2006 Las Vegas PubCon Insider Tips
After extensive research this weekend I was able to find out many things from the "horse's mouth's" so to speak.
Some great info, and more importantly, verification of a few important opinions, that we can now call fact. Some of it is old stuff, but important to rehash for people new to SEO.
The quotes are directly from Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google, Ramez Naam from MSN Search, and a pair of Ask.com search pros, Rahul Lahiri and Kaushal Kurapati, but some are in the original form of a statement for clarity purposes.
So here we go...
First and foremost
Google
1. He also noted the completion of Google's "Bigdaddy" infrastructure update
2. Sitemaps helps webmasters diagnose and debug crawler problems. It provides a way for webmasters to tell Google which URLs are most important.
3. Sitemaps will report 40 different errors in 5 categories. Said Cutts: "Its really helpful to be able to see problems without having to ask Google directly."
4. We're trying to improve spam report communication
5. Along with the various Bigdaddy search infrastructure updates, like fresher indexing, smarter crawling that uses less bandwidth, and a new crawl cache, Google has been refreshing a supplemental index at one data center. Cutts identified its IP address as 72.14.207.104, mostly visible by Canadian visitors right now.
Yahoo - Tim Meyer
Tim Meyer provided some tips that can help webmasters with their Yahoo Search indexing:
1. Use Page specific titles and page specific metatags
2. Separate pages only when there is separate content
3. Utilize multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses
Mayer also identified the crawlers webmasters may see dwelling in their logfiles, by name and focus:
Slurp - Search
Seeker - Shopping
YahooMMCrawler/3.x - Images
Yahoo-MMAudVid/1.0 - Multimedia
He also provided a brief overview of their new New Site Explorer ; "This is a way to give you a quick view of what's going on with a site," Mayer said. Webmasters should give it a try.
Yahoo - Tim Converse
It was just suggested by Tim that in some cases it's best to start a new site if you've been penalized, but first he said to clean up the site and then get it reviewed. This is the first "official" recognition I've seen for the idea that a URL can be so poisoned it must be abandoned.
Ask.com
1. Their search engine does not accept cookies, and webmasters should not include session IDs in the URLs they want indexed.
2. They do recommend providing a http-last modified header, and to ensure a 404 message appears on any custom 404 pages.
3. Ask's spider obeys the Crawl-Delay directive in robots.txt files, useful if the Ask bot is too aggressive in crawling pages.
The biggest news, of course, was the Open Sitemaps announcement. The idea of engines reading a common sitemap format from webmasters. Its about time!
Now for the general information across all the Attendees
Link Exchanges
Reason to use Link Exchange
1. It provides relevant traffic independent of SE's
2. Extremely cost efficient
3. Relevant links may increase performance in SE's
4. Links provide users with knowledge gateways to alternative information.
How to ID potential link partners:
1. Look for sites that have an unusual amount of high quality content, sites that link to other high quality sites
2. Relevant links are typically obtained slowly (aka "naturally") so avoid sudden high volume
3. Always maintain editorial discretions. Always use link exchange forms when available
4. Make linking decisions for the end users, not for the search engines.
5. Link with related businesses that you already have an established relationship with.
There's alot more information out there, but its 10:30 here for me and I get to call back the 30+ corporate types I met at The Revolution Forum down in Warwickshire, England.
What a convention. If you don't know about the way they work you should check them out. Its the way we should do it in America.
The cool thing is that I was the only American there and once of the entertainers picked on me one night, so even though there were hundreds of providers and delegates, everyone will remember when I call! (Because of my "Canadian" accent. Which is actually a mixture of Yankee and Redneck having lived up and down the east coast...Canadian. Of course I can't talk, they can tell by a few words what side of the country your from, including Wales and Scotland, but think New Zealanders have an Australian accent)
Anyhow, add what you find out over the next couple days. It sounds like it was a fantastic conference.
GaryTheScubaGuy
Some great info, and more importantly, verification of a few important opinions, that we can now call fact. Some of it is old stuff, but important to rehash for people new to SEO.
The quotes are directly from Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google, Ramez Naam from MSN Search, and a pair of Ask.com search pros, Rahul Lahiri and Kaushal Kurapati, but some are in the original form of a statement for clarity purposes.
So here we go...
First and foremost
1. He also noted the completion of Google's "Bigdaddy" infrastructure update
2. Sitemaps helps webmasters diagnose and debug crawler problems. It provides a way for webmasters to tell Google which URLs are most important.
3. Sitemaps will report 40 different errors in 5 categories. Said Cutts: "Its really helpful to be able to see problems without having to ask Google directly."
4. We're trying to improve spam report communication
5. Along with the various Bigdaddy search infrastructure updates, like fresher indexing, smarter crawling that uses less bandwidth, and a new crawl cache, Google has been refreshing a supplemental index at one data center. Cutts identified its IP address as 72.14.207.104, mostly visible by Canadian visitors right now.
Yahoo - Tim Meyer
Tim Meyer provided some tips that can help webmasters with their Yahoo Search indexing:
1. Use Page specific titles and page specific metatags
2. Separate pages only when there is separate content
3. Utilize multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses
Mayer also identified the crawlers webmasters may see dwelling in their logfiles, by name and focus:
Slurp - Search
Seeker - Shopping
YahooMMCrawler/3.x - Images
Yahoo-MMAudVid/1.0 - Multimedia
He also provided a brief overview of their new New Site Explorer ; "This is a way to give you a quick view of what's going on with a site," Mayer said. Webmasters should give it a try.
Yahoo - Tim Converse
It was just suggested by Tim that in some cases it's best to start a new site if you've been penalized, but first he said to clean up the site and then get it reviewed. This is the first "official" recognition I've seen for the idea that a URL can be so poisoned it must be abandoned.
Ask.com
1. Their search engine does not accept cookies, and webmasters should not include session IDs in the URLs they want indexed.
2. They do recommend providing a http-last modified header, and to ensure a 404 message appears on any custom 404 pages.
3. Ask's spider obeys the Crawl-Delay directive in robots.txt files, useful if the Ask bot is too aggressive in crawling pages.
The biggest news, of course, was the Open Sitemaps announcement. The idea of engines reading a common sitemap format from webmasters. Its about time!
Now for the general information across all the Attendees
Link Exchanges
Reason to use Link Exchange
1. It provides relevant traffic independent of SE's
2. Extremely cost efficient
3. Relevant links may increase performance in SE's
4. Links provide users with knowledge gateways to alternative information.
How to ID potential link partners:
1. Look for sites that have an unusual amount of high quality content, sites that link to other high quality sites
2. Relevant links are typically obtained slowly (aka "naturally") so avoid sudden high volume
3. Always maintain editorial discretions. Always use link exchange forms when available
4. Make linking decisions for the end users, not for the search engines.
5. Link with related businesses that you already have an established relationship with.
(Thanks to SE Roundtable)
There's alot more information out there, but its 10:30 here for me and I get to call back the 30+ corporate types I met at The Revolution Forum down in Warwickshire, England.
What a convention. If you don't know about the way they work you should check them out. Its the way we should do it in America.
The cool thing is that I was the only American there and once of the entertainers picked on me one night, so even though there were hundreds of providers and delegates, everyone will remember when I call! (Because of my "Canadian" accent. Which is actually a mixture of Yankee and Redneck having lived up and down the east coast...Canadian. Of course I can't talk, they can tell by a few words what side of the country your from, including Wales and Scotland, but think New Zealanders have an Australian accent)
Anyhow, add what you find out over the next couple days. It sounds like it was a fantastic conference.
GaryTheScubaGuy
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