Search Engines and Webmasters – aka: The Search Engine Smack Down

They’re probably not going to be doing a spring conference. Instead likely more of the one day type events.

Tim Mayer
Several of the search engines have announced a unified sitemap structure. MSN, Google and Yahoo. Ask is invinted too.
Yahoo search mission is to enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowlege. Find: enable people to find what they are looking for, use search not for sake of searching but to achive a purpose. Share sharing knowldge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with. Expand: yahoo answers helping expand the amount of information on the web.
Getting into the search index: Link to the url from an already indexed URL simple urls and shallow urls, 3 to 4 levels deep, good athoritative links.
Unique content, page-specific titles, page-specific metatags. Seperare pages only when there is seperate content. Multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses.
Avoid Spam:
excessive doorway pages/domaons
keyword suffing
hidden links/texts
link farms massive domain interlinking
off-topic links dilute valuable links
internal links don’t help/hurt rankins

Regexp in robots.txt, they support the google style format. wildcards, anchors.
if rules disagree, the more specific statement will supersceded the shorter command
no archive, they also have crawl delay.

Search Builder, customized web search, site search and customized vertical news search. strong international adoption, monetization in 2007. He’s going through how it works. 4 easy steps to create a search box, you put the code on your blog or site, then it will create a cobranded yahoo SERP with site publisher branding and it gives you keyword reporting. Topic oriented search, tweaking of organic results, popular search term cloud, query history reports for publishers.

Site explorer
you can login via yahoo id, then you can add as many sites as you’d like to add, and you can see your feeds. there is also site authentication. you can manage sitefeeds and add feeds and if you’re authenticated you can get info on its processing. You can just go to the site explorer page without the management and overhead of ID to submit a page or feed or sitemap. You put an authenticatioon key on your site and within 24 hours they’ll check it and you can get lots of useful information on processing. site explorer lets you see inlinks, indexed sites, tim says they’re one of the only search engines that provide the full back links data.
Ysearchblog will post about what is to come.

Eytan Seidman MSN
He’s going to talk about live search, he’s asking what products everyone is using. IE, firefox, xp, mac, who’s doing white hat and who’s doing spam.
live search:
web, news, local, images.
He’s showing live image search with the endless scroll bar. and a slider, there are lots of sexy ajax features. He’s talking very fast.
He’s showing that if you search for a person in image searcht they’ll show related people.
people want a tremendous amount of images. you can consume lots of images and people search for people in image search a lot.
Infinte scroll bar works well in images, not so well in web search.
local search 2d and 3d maps for zooming around and see what its like.
web search
core relevance their relevance is improving all the time
crawling, deeper crawls, support for new content types (eg HTTPS)
reducing spam
improving display using an example of university of arizona descriptions of sites are reading more like queries.

Better tools for searching, noodp crawl commands and robots.txt
new query commands:
ip: all the pages on a certain IP. (these two look cool)
and many others…
search macros example: macro:livelabs.msdn select. cancatenate all search commands

sitemaps, they support the new sitemap format.
They want to hear from us MSNdude, webmasterworld, forums, stickymail and the livesearch blog

Peter Linsley
They support all the noodp and robots type stuff
He’s showing some financial data. They’re the 4th biggst search engine.

dynamic comunity clustering and expertrank
search verticals for blogs, images, news maps etc
search enhancing tools such as related search, binoculars, smart answers and a unique under interface.
He’s showing a SERP with onebox type results, instead of sponsored ads on the right there are related search, like for narrowing the search or expand it, and related names. Binoculars, you can preview the site itself.

blog search
bloglines was acquired by ask.
blog search is currently tracking millions of feeds. subcriptions in bloglines will gurantee we know about your feed, basic SEO and standard blogg specific rules apply to gain popularity, blogging frequently helps, blogging original content that is useful, “suck a little bit less than the other guy”
high popular blogs can appear as smart answers on the ask SERPs.
He’s showing a screenshot of the bloglines search for webmaster world. with subscription and opinion vs news feed blogs.

best practices for ask SEO
expertrank and related search means more opportunities for ranking
garner links from pages that are on topic, this results in higher returns than links from off topic pages generic links are not bad.
configure robots,txt to allow the crawler.

langauge and country description
search engines have to guess language and country, you can improve our accuracy
may not appear in SERP if incorrectly detected or may gain an unwanted translate this page link
improve accuracy of language with plenty of text and using unicode
no spelling mistakes
Improve accuracy of country detection with ccTLD or hosting locally.

Matt Cutts
matt is curious about the demographics of seo, lots of people are older than 30, he’s also asking about democratic or republican.

what’s new
the united sitemapes ( a common format.

he’s recapping what’s happened in the last year.
Google calendar, gmail, google docs, google checkout

products highlght
webmaster central, maps, custom search engine, google reader, calendar gmail, hosted services/apps, picasaweb, notebook
the webmaster central, opens up a dialog, it shows 40 different type of errors, 404’s robots.txt
it shows you what you’re showing up for and what people are clickiing on.
pretty graphs were just introduced, how many pages a day we getting crawled. how many kilobytes googlebot is using, and how long the pages are taking to load

google earths and googlemaps
google earth added 16 historical maps

custom search engine
it can index over as many sites as you want, anything from sitessearch to a list of as many sites as you want. You can apply a boost to specific sites and use regular results. and you can let people add sites. Bookmarklets.

Google Reader
it has been totally been rewritten matt has a list of blackhat sites in his reader. a few people in this audience.

live everywhere by feb
deeper crawling and fresher indexing

supplimental resaults are determined by pagerank
if you get more links you will show up in the normal results. is still old pagerank for a while.
most of the new infrastructure will be transperant.

communication updates, googleguy showed up in WMW 5 years ago.
today 25 googlers, 5 people working on communication
webmaster trends analyst just hired to look to blogosphere for problems
blogs and forums
webmaster consule (robots.txt problems penalties)
webmaster forums
Matt says brian white is the best guy on spam in the world, he’s being sent to europe to crack down on european spam

he’s showing a graph of how google handles spam reports.
its in the google webmaster console, you can also report spam via this console
they recieve more weight from the webmaster central, its more trusted.

is there a webmaster credit history? Matt wouldn’t “put it that way”. Matt thinks it would be cool though.
Tim Mayer says is all about trust.

there is discussion at yahoo about implimenting a big daddy type cache server.

someone is asking about scraping.
there are some tests running on different ways to spot scraping.
do you get penalized by being linked to from a scraper, matt says no inlink can hurt you.
she’s saying that adsense is the reason for scraping.
a random slice of adsense content and its mostly good.

will custom search have adsense. if you’re not a nonprofit you can get a revshare on a custom search engine.
will YPN ever go to canada, or do you hate us? Tim can’t answer that question, he’s on the websearch side.

any plans to allow a linkfromdomain command?
tim thinks its cool feature, they don’t have a launch date to annouce, but its cool
google has a IP operator, allinanchor and allintitle don’t get a ton of use from normal users, they might offer this type of stuff from webmaster console.
He’s suggesting to show where the 404s came from in the consoles.

some really specific phrases some sites may be on the fringe of having enough links to be in the crawl.

someone asked what the dilly with searchmash and matt is showing it
its a place for fun experiementing, a playground.

Brett wants NOODP, noarchive and stuff in robots.txt

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