This session is billed as a “State of the Engines” address by the leading search engines of today. Yahoo, Google, Ask, and Microsoft will all run down the current status, features, and fresh offerings from their respective search spaces.

Moderator: Brett Tabke

Speakers:
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Peter Linsley, Sr. Product Manager, Ask.com
Eytan Seidman, Program Manager, MSN Search, Microsoft Corp.

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Tim starts out talking about the Standard Sitemap announcement and how important it is and that hopefully ask.com will join as well.

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 to achieve a purpose
• Share – share your knowledge with others
• This all leads to Expand (for example Yahoo! Answers)

How to get into the Yahoo index – Link new URL from existing page in index is best

Unique Content (page specific titles / meta tags / separate pages only when there is separate content / multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses)

Avoid Spam (Excessive doorway pages / keyword stuffing / link farms or massive domain interlinking)

Yahoo! now supports wildcards in robots.txt and anchor (disallows all files ending in ‘.gif’ and allows all URLs ending in ‘?’)

Useful Robot Commands - no archive and crawl-delay

Search Builder: custom search experience for your site (share revenues coming in ‘07). Create a topic orientated search. Tweaking of organic results. Popular search term cloud. Query history reports.

Sitemaps in Site Explorer – Manage site feeds. Authenticate your site here. Explorer a site.

Tim says that the best is yet to come… Points to http://ysearchblog.com/

Eytan Seidman, Program Manager, MSN Search, Microsoft Corp.

Asks a bunch of questions to get a feel for the audience – “after hearing so many pro Microsoft things in the previous session”.

Search | Broad Effort at MS

He does a Live.com image search demo: I would link to it but I can’t due to the live.com setup….

• Unlimited scrollbar
• Related people
• Advanced Slider (no next button)

Local Search http://maps.live.com/ – he says this is a sweet product

Web Search | 4 areas they are focusing on:

Core relevance

1. Crawling
2. Reducing Spam
3. Improving display (how sites read in the results)

Better tools for searching:

NOODP
New link query commands

• linkfromdomain
• ip:

Search Macros http://search.live.com/macros and http://gallery.live.com/ example: macro:livelabs.msdn select

Very excited about supporting sitemaps.org with Google and Yahoo!

Peter Linsley, Sr. Product Manager, Ask.com

He starts out by saying that much of the SEO tips already talked about also hold true for Ask.

Tech overview

Uses ExpertRank – dynamic community bases algorithms Search verticals for blogs, images, news, maps etc Smart answers (uses example of a pythong search) Mouse over the binoculars for a snapshot of the site

Blog search is very important to them via Bloglines

Ask.com best practices for SEO

ExpertRank and related to search means more opportunities for ranking
Garner links from pages that are on topic
Configure robots.txt to allow the ask crawler

Language and country detection

SEs have to guess your language and country
May not appear in SERPs if incorrectly detected or may gain an unwanted translate this page link
Improve with plenty of text and using Utnicode (UTF-8) Improve accuracy of country with ccTLD or hosting locally

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.

Matt starts out by asking about the demographics of the audience. Most are over 30 and SEOs. And a little more are Democratic vs. Republicans.

He points to this post where he asked what people were most pleased with re: Google since last PubCon.

Sitemaps.org – search engines united.

Recap – what’s new with Google since the last PubCon.

• Improvement to Webmaster Console and forum
• Google CSE
• Relaunch of Google Reader
• Improvements to Gmail and Google Calendar
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Webmaster Console – helps you diagnose and debug crawl problems. Sitemaps will augment link-based crawling, not replace it. This is not a move towards paid inclusion. They report on 40 different errors. Shows you what you are showing up for and what people are clicking on. The new graphs just got introduced (Matt loves pretty graphs.)

Google Earth – added a new dimension: Time. They added 16 historical maps.

Custom Search Engine – you can have as many as you want. Matt was actually surprised how many people really liked this.

Google Reader – he was really into Bloglines but switched when they overhauled it.

Infrastructure Status

BigDaddy
Supplementals – only based on PageRank and amount of links you have.
PageRank serving – also serves info: link: and related:

Communications update

GoogleGuy: 5 year anniversary last month
Two years ago: Matt giving 5 presentations
Today: 25 Googlers, 5 people working on communication / Webmaster Trends Analyst just got hired
Webmaster forum

How Google handles spam reports

He says they will often email someone when they are spamming
Webmaster console is the best place to report spam and request reinclusion (more trusted then the regular spam report form)

Q&A

Question: Are you guys trying to come up with a webmaster credit history?
Matt: I wouldn’t put it that way. For example – www. vs non. We wanted a place for people to be able to communicate like that. I would like people to be able to get credit for reporting good spam reports.
Tim: Its really about trust and knowing that the people who own the sites are the real people. We don’t want to give out info about a site to just anyone.

Question: Do the other search engines have any plans of being able to verify your spiders when they crawl like Google with the reverse DNS?
Eytan: We should be doing that soon as Livesearch or Livebot.

Question: Do you plan on doing a cache server like Google instead of 9 or 10 crawlers hitting us?
Tim: Yes – there is a lot of discussion around that right now.

Question: Matt – scraping is such a huge issue with us – is there any further issue on why people are scraping?
Matt: Scraping is very low quality stuff. There’s a guy on my team looking at ways to spot scraping.
Question: Do you get penalized if scraper sites link to you?
Matt: No – its like porn sites linking Exit to Disney.
Question: My question was directly related to scrapers and Google AdSense though.
Matt: We talk about this but if you look at a random AdSense sampling the content is good but there are a lot of bad ones.

Question: Matt with CSE can we get AdSense implemented on that?
Matt: Done – that’s how it works.

Question: Is YPN ever going to Canada or do you hate us?
Tim: I would have to ask the YPN team. I can’t answer that.

Question: Matt or Tim – any plans to implement linkfromdomain?
Tim: I think its a cool feature but its not in our immediate plans.
Matt: Perhaps from the Webmaster Console.

Question: Can you please have Webmaster Console tell us where the 404 errors come from?!
Matt: They know this one and are working on it!

Question: For Matt – I have a client listed in Google local and everything was fine except for the URL. laughter
Matt: I can help with this stop by after and I will write your URL down and beat up the guy in charge of this who is five offices down from me.

Q: Why do sites vanish from some data centers and rank high on others
Matt: Could be differences in data center pushes. You might be on the fringe of the index. Get more links.

Q: With the standardization of sitemaps – can’t it be easier to switch your domain?
Matt: Yes – Vanessa – are you listening?
Vanessa: Yes – writing it down…

Searchmash – it’s a place for people to experiment but not ruin the user experience

Brett – can you guys standardize all the extension like robots.txt and NOODP. Loud applause from the audience…

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