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Need some images? Now you can keep it legal, with Google Images usage rights filter

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There’s a commonly-held myth that any image found in Google images is fair game for anyone who wants to use it. In reality, most images are copyrighted by default and usage generally requires permission – especially for commercial use.

Google’s Matt Cutts has tweeted that you can now filter images by usage rights. If you want to find images you can use commercially, for example, just do your search, click Search Tools and then select ‘labelled for commercial use’ from the pull-down.

It’s not immediately apparent how Google identifies the permissions associated with an image. We’ve reached out to Google and will update when we have a response.

Google Webmaster now features site health status

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For those of you who manage a lot of sites, Google’s latest addition to Webmaster is sure to benefit you. Tonight, Google has announced a new Webmaster tool that allows you to see if you’re site is in good standing — to make sure there aren’t any issues. As you can see above it’s pretty simple. Here’s what Google checks for:

  1. Have we detected malware on the site?
  2. Have any important pages been removed via our URL removal tool?
  3. Are any of your important pages blocked from crawling in robots.txt?