This session is moderated by Brett Tabke.
Rahul Lahiri, Vice President of Search Product Management AskJeeves No powerpoint but he is going to go through some questions and answers he has on paper.
The questions he gets is why don't we get ranked? Why is out site missing from Ask? Why is our site getting crawled too much? Why are you crawling these pages when I said no? And which tags do you support? He plugged Cre8asite Forums thread, he will answer those questions mostly.
He said when building a site, make sure you make it for your users. "Its all about content" without it, its hard to rank well. Link to good sites on the net. Make sure to have good, internal, navigation. You at where your referrals are coming from to better understand the users. For the search engine you have to have links to rank well for popular keywords. When your looking to get links, look for themed links to your site. Subject specific links weight a lot more in the Teoma world. He then explains the hubs and authorities concept with teoma. If you have a large dynamic site (variables in URL) then make sure to create a site map to link direct to those pages. He said, he into DMOZ and directories. Dont spam, dont link farm, dont use redirect gateways, mirrors and affiliate sites. He then goes over the teoma ranking technology.
Sites not getting crawled? (1) Get links, (2) If its a domain you purchased recently and it was spam site, it can be in their block list - let them know.
Crawl delay is supported, noindex is support, nofollow and nocache but not the nofollow link attribute.
Eytan Seidman, Program Manager, MSN Search Microsoft Corp. MSN Search Timeline - Started in 1998 with Yahoo as a partner - In Jan 2003 they decided to invest in building its own technlogy - July 2004 they released preview - etc.
Today's Reality Billions of Web links, hard to find what you need, many needs go unanswered. The Dream Search helps me with everything...
He then moved into a demo mode, search.msn.com. Tech glitch with the web results that came up...So he jumped to Local Beta product. He typed in Dry Cleaners, New Orleans and it brought up results.
June 2005 Release - MSN Local Search Beta - MSN Search Answers (basketball, baseball) - Core Web Search Improvements (improved ranking algo, and changed the way they crawl the Web)
Features for Webmasters - Selection -- Most Comprehensive -- Organic Crawl - Protocols -- Exclusion - Robot.txt -- Inclusion - Submit URL (Free)
Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search He said how much he likes the WebmasterWorld conference.
Yahoo Search Vision - Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge - Find: Enable people to find what they are looking for - Use: Search not for sake of searching, but to achieve a purpose - Share: Sharing knowledge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with - Expand: A promise of what is coming in the future (one such thing is the creative commons)
Why You need to be Included in Yahoo! - Yahoo Gaining Market Share - Large audience
How to Get into the Index - Link new URL from existing page in index - Make sure all URLs have inbound link - Good authoritative links into site to encourage deep crawls - Don't make the site depth too extreme (3 or 4 levels is good) - Use the free addurl service if all else fails (http://submit/search.yahoo.com/free/request)
Yahoo Crawlers: User Agents - Slurp (Search) - Seeker (Shopping) - Newscrawler - MMCrawler - MMAudVid
Useful Robots Commands - No Archive & Crawl Delay - Bandwidth Saving Ideas - Yahoo Redirect Handing Rules
Inclusion Realities - Paid inclusion system is an entirely different content system than the main crawl - Any submission to the paid inclusion service will have no impact on free crawl - If I dont renew my subscription - We suggest inclusion submitted content to the crawler and it decides whether to include it in the index base.
He showed off MyWeb, RSS Features, and so on. He showed how many products they have been launching. He wanted to highlight Y!Q product.
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Google Inc. Google Mission Organize the world's info to make it universally accessible and useful.
He then recaps the past year new announcements. This year they announced; Google Maps, Google Local, Gmail storage, Video Search, Desktop, My Search History, Google Scholar/libraries, and Machine translation. Google Suggest, More & better communication (google blog), revamped webmaster pages, 10 engineers x 2 hours - 20 hours of answering questions (meet the engineers), nofollow, radical improvements on 302s, google sitemaps, update bourbon ([email protected]), AdSense spam reports.
Pretty funny, Tim and Matt while Matt is speaking are hitting eachother. Tim said, how you handling those 302s now. ;) Matt said we just announced Google Sitemaps, a paid inclusion but for free. ;)
How Google Handles Spam Report Communication - Site indexed - Detection - Corrective action - Webmaster fixes site (google.com/support with "reinclusion request" in subject line) - Approval
Nofollow - Shows an example of the code - Allow someone to say "I cant wont vouch for this link (blog comments, guestbooks, referrer pages, etc.) - Lots of software already adopted the tag (so webmasters dont need to deal with it) - A new, standards-compliant attribute that anyone can use to give more information about a link.
302s - Previous heuristics were vulnerable (Given two URLs, take the one with higher PageRank) - Problem: For a while, most hijacked URLs were penalized -- Spam penalties caused low PR -- No one would tell us the name of their site - Really got strongly on the radar after WMW Las Vegas - Many problems fixed in late 2004, most of rest fixed in March 2005 - Now we have: -- an internal mailing list and dedicated engineering resources -- a way to report problems google.com/support with "Canonical page" in subject -- an engineer at the Q&A last night works on 302s - We are open to suggestions for how to improve heuristics - Misconception: allinurl:mydomain.com does a search for "mydomain com" in URL - Real problem: if site:mydomain.com shows urls from other domains - Do NOT use the URL removal tool to try to trim wrong versions of a URL - Do pick a standard root page, and do 301 permanent redirects from variant pages to standard page -- e.g. mydomain.com -> 301 - > www.mydomain.com - By the way, [adsense] was a newer bug, It was only two weeks old.
Google Sitemaps - Provides method to tell Google about URLs - Dont let the XML scare you - Text files work as well - Try it out he says
Reporting AdSense Spam and Scraper Sites - They have way to report this spam, because GoogleGuy hates this type of spam. - He showed a funny example about this (save that for people who paid to attend - plus too long to offer)
Update Bourbon - Algo A around May 20 - Algo B around June 3 - Algo C around June 10 (no one noticed) - Algo A with newer data around June 16 - Algo D at June 16 (no one noticed)
feedback [email protected]
Then he chats about future stuff; globalization, new types of data, more communication and SEO will get easier, spamming will get harder.
