Google's John Mueller has stated that Google is limited to only processing up to 500KB of their robots.txt files.
John made a statement on his Google+ page that read, “#102 of the things to keep in mind when working on a big website: If you have a giant robots.txt file, remember that Googlebot will only read the first 500kb. If your robots.txt is longer, it can result in a line being truncated in an unwanted way. The simple solution is to limit your robots.txt files to a reasonable size 
.”
Recently Google announced the an update to Webmaster Tools sitemaps.
Now onwards sitemaps page will also display statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News, thus retiring Video Sitemaps Labs. This new addition will let you know how many items of each type were added and for few content types, the number of indexed items.
In 2012, Google has continued its Panda Update with a Panda 3.2 update rolled out on January 18, 2012 (estimated date of the roll out). Google has revealed to search industry professionals that it has done a data refresh of the Google Panda algorithm with no algorithm changes. Webmasters experiencing ranking changes were discussing this on the WebmasterWorld forum for the past couple of days. Some sites had lost their rankings while the ones hit earlier were seeing higher SERPs- indicating a data refresh undertaken by Google.
The definitions of average position in the search query report in Google Webmaster Tools and search optimization report in Google Analytics is being changed by Google. The change was revealed in the Google Webmaster Blog and Google Analytics Blog.
What’s the new definition?
Google has a newly redesigned Submit Your Content page. The URL submission tool page has also been updated. You can now submit content at google.com/submityourcontent. This page was launched in September 2008, and now has been given a facelift by Google. The purpose of the page was to act as an information resource for site owners to find out how to submit content to Google’s various portals.
Google Inc. has announced through their official blog that they will be changing their current Privacy Policies and Google Terms of Service. These changes will assist Google to link their users across all Google products like Gmail, youtube, Google+ and so on. Google has indicated that the changes will be reflected in just over a month.
The head of Google’s Webspam Team, Matt Cutts in on a trip to India and did a ‘HangOut’ with Indian Webmasters from Hyderabad. This HangOut was a part of his webmaster outreach program with a group of Googlers involved in the same. In order to interact better with the Indian siteowners, this is how Matt welcomed them to ask questions on his Google+ profile, “I'm here in Hyderabad, India, and I might try to do a Google+ hangout in a few minutes to answer some questions from Indian webmasters. If you have SEO questions that you'd like for me to answer, just leave a question in the comments!”
In a fresh upgrade involving punctuation marks, Google has updated its search results. So, now when you search for a “;” as in semicolon, you will now get search results. While some of the results are relevant, some may be not (the search for “/” slash reveals a music band with the same name on top). Here is what the search for “!” reveals:
If you are a surfer , then Google’s new move will do good for you. For webmasters, it means of lot of damage control. Google has brought in a new change titled the- ‘Page layout algorithm’ which is designed to penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads.
Google has provided programmatic access to the search queries data in Webmaster Tools with ‘Python’. The Python script for downloading search query data was brought by Google in December 2011 and now has new download options that make the data download highly more useful.
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