Live Coverage of Ask The Search Engines at SMX West

1:01	Barry Schwartz: Okay, so the news about the new Canonical tag is our a bit early, SELand has a story that sums it up at http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537

1:02	Barry Schwartz: The Search Engines will be talking about this on the panel

1:02	Barry Schwartz: Session starts in 30 minutes

1:07	[Comment From Guest] Hi Barry. Is this where Matt Cutts participate? Thanks. Harith

1:07	Barry Schwartz: Yes

1:08

Barry Schwartz: Ask The Search Engines - Put your questions to this panel of search engine engineers and representatives who know how things work behind the scenes in terms of indexing and ranking pages

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO

Speakers:

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Keith Hogan, Vice President, Search Technology, Ask.com
Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Live Search, Microsoft
Sharad Verma, Senior Manager, Yahoo! Search Technology, Yahoo!

1:08	[Comment From Harith] A question to Matt Cutts: Aren't you going to blog more details about the issue of google.co.jp?

1:09	Barry Schwartz: Harith, I think the answer is yes, after he gets back from the conference

1:09	[Comment From Prashant] @barry do you guys cover all of the smx events? i'm new to these livebloggings

1:09	Barry Schwartz: @prashant, many, not all

1:09	[Comment From Guest] I've got a WP plugin and Drupal and Magento module ready for that tag: http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/

1:09	Barry Schwartz: @Yoast, yes, Matt told me. Awesome!

1:10	Barry Schwartz: ~20 minutes until the panel starts

1:11	[Comment From Prashant] i love yoast.com!

1:14	Barry Schwartz: ~15 minutes to session start time

1:16	Barry Schwartz: Again, read major news about Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduct Duplicate Content Clutter at Search Engine Land - we will live blog all the details in about 15 minutes

1:18	[Comment From Harith] Question to Matt Cutts: According to google.co.jp issue can we assume for sure now that a sudden drope in Google TBPR indicates a penalty from WebSpam Team? :-)

1:19	Barry Schwartz: @Hairth, yes, Matt confirmed this

1:23	[Comment From lyndseo] Hey Barry, how did the announce the news? Did Danny announce it?

1:24	Barry Schwartz: @Lyndseo, it is officially being announced at SMX west in this panel, but the news is live at Google Blog, Yahoo Blog and SELand, amongst others, as of 12:30 pst

1:24	[Comment From Joost de Valk] MS has blogged it too now Barry

1:25	Barry Schwartz: @Joost, thanks adding link

1:25	Barry Schwartz: @Joost, where is the link to MSN?

1:25	Barry Schwartz: Again, read major news about Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduct Duplicate Content Clutter at Search Engine Land - we will live blog all the details in about 5 minutes

1:26	[Comment From Michael Martinez] Barry, I'd like to know if Google is going to restore fast indexing to Blogsearch ala pre-October update. Used to index blog posts in minutes. Now takes days. I provided queries and screen captures: http://tinyurl.com/bnjpeo

1:27	Barry Schwartz: @Michael my posts get indexed in seconds

1:27	Barry Schwartz: @Michael http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=Live%20Coverage%20of%20Ask%20The%20Search%20Engines%20at%20SMX%20West&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wb

1:27	[Comment From Harith] Barry. C'mon tweet about you are live covering this important session. I did it for you for my 446 followers :-)

1:27	Barry Schwartz: @HArith I did

1:29	[Comment From Michael Martinez] http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=site:seroundtable.com&scoring=d

1:29	Barry Schwartz: @Michael you see my link? anyway, starting soon...

1:31	[Comment From Michael Martinez] Barry, you are NOT being indexed within seconds. Look at the timestamps.

1:31	Barry Schwartz: @Michael true

1:31	[Comment From Michael Martinez] Please ask.

1:32	Barry Schwartz: @Michael they have confirmed they have major issues now, see http://groups.google.com/group/google-blog-search/browse_thread/thread/75267bf8c4766b0c

1:32

[Comment From Bill]
The canonical news, will that work across sites? For example if a site syndicates to other sites and wants to be known as the primary site/page for that article, can that tag be put int he header of the page that the syndication story is on to give credit to the site that is doing the syndication?

1:33	Barry Schwartz: @bill good Q, asking

1:33	[Comment From Harith] Barry. Can you ask please. Does Google.co.jp considered now as a bad neighborhood to link to?

1:33	Barry Schwartz: @Hairth they "dont trust it" as much as they use to, that is the answer

1:35	[Comment From Joost de Valk] @Bill: no. it'll only work within the domain, not outside of it.

1:35	[Comment From eClaire] Curious: Will this help pass link juice to the canonical url, same as a 301 might?

1:35	[Comment From Bill] Thank you Barry

1:35	[Comment From Michael Martinez] Barry, they have NO CLUE about this problem or they are not acknowledging it. Have read the thread. They are not addressing the issue.

1:35	Barry Schwartz: Staritng now with Matt Cutts

1:36	Barry Schwartz: Very excited about good news to tell you

1:36	Barry Schwartz: Multiple search engines supporting

1:36

1:36	Barry Schwartz: He says Darwin was borned today and one thing evolve is duplicate content

1:36	Barry Schwartz: Dup content is a major issues for SEOs and webmasters

1:37	Barry Schwartz: There are many ways to fix dup content (1) Make sure your CMS is solid with one URL for one piece of content (2) Link to one URL (3) Webmaster Tools perferred domain (4) 301 URLs

1:37	[Comment From Guest] go, go Barry we're all ears :)

1:37	Barry Schwartz: Most SEOs have dup issues and there are issues you cannot solve

1:39	Barry Schwartz: The solution is a link element you put in the head of the page

1:39	[Comment From steve W] Does the content have to be exactly the same? what if you are combining the content from several pages onto one page?

1:39	[Comment From Michael Martinez] Wipe the site. Start over. Duplicate content issue resolved.

1:40	Barry Schwartz: This is a hint, not a rule, search engines don't have to abide by it

1:40	Barry Schwartz: So don't rely on it, do everything you can before doing this

1:40	Barry Schwartz: Avoid dups as much as you can

1:40	[Comment From Scott Clark] I'm liking this feature already.

1:40	[Comment From Bob Gladstein] A lot of content management systems are going to have to be updated to allow an administrator to indicate which of a given product's URLs is to be treated as canonical.

1:40	Barry Schwartz: This does not work across domains

1:41	Keri Morgret: You can also hold back and wait for people to develop plugins for things like wordpress so you don't need to do all of the work yourself.

1:41	Barry Schwartz: It does work across subdomains i.e. sub.domain.com

1:41	Barry Schwartz: You can use it for https and http

1:41	Barry Schwartz: Very similar to a 301 redirect

1:41

1:41	Keri Morgret: Do the pages have to be bit-for-bit identical? No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are OK.

1:42	Keri Morgret: Can I use relative or absolute URLs? Yes, but we highly suggest that you use absolute URLs.

1:42	Barry Schwartz: Matt said it works with relative URLs, but try to stick with abosolute URLs

1:42	[Comment From Bill] What things, besides the link back to the original doc, are suggested across domains to show canonical version.

1:42	[Comment From Michael Martinez] Barry you might want to add the https/http example to Vanessa's article.

1:42	Keri Morgret: Can you follow a chain of canonicals? We may, but don't count on it. Point directly to the final URL. This just applies to Google.

1:42	[Comment From Scott Clark] Wordpress Drupal and Magento modules done already here http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/

1:42

1:43	Barry Schwartz: Can this be abused? People laugh

1:43	Barry Schwartz: This is a powerful tool, use it wisely

1:44	Barry Schwartz: Joachim Kupke at Google did heavy lifting for this

1:44	[Comment From Guest] if you use absolute URLS and you have keywords in your URLS your density is higher

1:44

1:45	Barry Schwartz: He calls out Yoast.com and he has plugins already

1:45	[Comment From some guy] so if two pages on two sites with the same identical page both claim "canonical".....

1:45	[Comment From Joost de Valk] Gotta love it ;)

1:45	[Comment From Matt McGee] Yoast So rocks. :)

1:45	Barry Schwartz: Matt is now done

1:46	[Comment From James] Yaost os the WP plugin king

1:46	Barry Schwartz: Priyank from Yahoo says hello

1:46

1:46	Barry Schwartz: Sashi from Microsoft says hello

1:47

1:47	Barry Schwartz: Keith says hello as well

1:47	Barry Schwartz: Keith from Ask.com

1:47

1:47	[Comment From James] Surprised this comment section isnt filled with a bit of spam

1:47	Barry Schwartz: @James it is moderated

1:47	[Comment From AnneHaynes] Hi Keith

1:48	Barry Schwartz: Q&A Time

1:48	[Comment From some guy] that was quick

1:48	Barry Schwartz: @Some Guy, this is a Q&A panel

1:48	[Comment From some guy] was his session: oh yeah, ask.com too.

1:48	[Comment From AnneHaynes] ROFL