Monthly Archives: November 2009

Barry and I live blogged PubCon's Search Engine Smackdown session last week but a number of folks have asked about notes. Here they are….

Matt Cutts "State of the Index" PubCon (Las Vegas) November 2009

WHAT HAS GOOGLE DONE IN THE PAST YEAR?

WHAT HAS GOOGLE DONE FOR WEB DEVELOPERS?

WHAT HAS GOOGLE DONE FOR WEBMASTERS?

  • rel=canonical ( A great tool for webmasters when 301s aren't optional)
  • Parameter handling (Google Webmaster Tools)
  • Fetch As Googlebot (Matt said this is his favorite Webmaster Tool, that many times sites have been hacked or are cloaking Googlebot. "Fetch As Googlebot" helps webmasters see these issues. Better malware warnings to show webmasters exactly where Google sees malware have also been added. Google now sends emails to webmasters via Google Webmaster Tools.)
  • Keyword Significance/Details (Google Webmaster Tools, Added earlier today)
  • Communication (80 posts on Google Webmaster Blog, Google SEO Starter Guide, Webmaster Console now in 40 languages & all of Wysz's great videos on YouTube)
  • Caffeine (Matt said, Caffeine will help Google index in seconds and that it will be available on one data center in a week or two but, that Google won't fully roll out Caffeine until after the holidays!)

TAKEAWAYS

  • Try Social Search
  • Speed up your site
  • Dig into webmaster console
  • Subscribe to official blog,video channel
Matt Cutts Takeaway slide from PubCon Las Vegas

Matt Cutts Takeaway slide from PubCon Las Vegas

Matt Cutts provided some interesting details about where the industry is headed, last week at PubCon.

During the "Interactive Site Review" session, Matt suggested investigating the history of each domain name you own or plan to purchase. He suggested avoiding domains with a shady history and dumping domains that appear to have been burned in the past. To investigate the history of a domain, Matt suggests Archive.org. Matt said, blocking Archive.org via robots.txt is a great indication of spam when already suspected.

Matt mentioned speed several times. During the "Interactive Site Review" Matt said that webmasters need to pay more attention to speed. He pointed out that landing page load time factors into AdWords Quality Score and said speed will be a big trend in 2010. During Matt's "State of the Index" presentation, he pointed out Google's tools for measuring page speed and even mentioned webpagetest.org a third party tool. According to Matt, Google is considering factoring page load speed into rankings. Matt said, that Larry Page wants pages to flip for users on the internet. He illustrated this point with Google Reader's reduction of pages from 2mb to 185kb. Nothing official yet but, something to keep an eye on for sure!

During Q&A for "The Search Engine Smackdown" session Matt explained Caffeine as being like a car with a new engine but not an algorithm change. Matt said, Caffeine will help Google index in seconds and that it should be active within a few weeks on one data center. That said, Caffeine won't roll out fully until after the holidays. Matt pointed out that Google is built for load balancing and for that reason isolating individual IPs for Caffeine testing access is difficult. Matt also mentioned that AJAX SERPs and Caffeine aren't related but that Google will continue testing AJAX SERPs.

In case you missed it, I was in Las Vegas last week for PubCon 2009. It was my first PubCon and as you can imagine, lots of fun! As far as presentations, every presentation was great but I do have a few favorites. Here they are in order of appearance…

- One of my favorite presentations at PubCon was Rob Snell's "Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization." Rob always impresses me with his creativity and common sense approach to increasing conversions with things like original content creation. Rob stressed liberating manufacturer content in addition to creating original product descriptions and content. Maybe it's a "southern thing" but is for certain, Rob is no "Dummy" when it comes to ideas for developing great content to increase ROI.

- Another great presentation was Ted Ulle's "SEO Design & Organic Site Structure." Ted's FRANKENSITE analogy was really great! He focused on the importance of keeping things simple and setting goals early. Ted offered some other really great advice about documenting decisions, graphic design being placed lower down the priority list and why "code geeks" shouldn't write copy. Splitting a cab with Ted was also a big thrill, it's not every day I get to ride with celebrities.

- Vanessa Fox's "Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking" presentation was really interesting. In addition to providing recent data about the average number of keywords per query, Vanessa dove into the topic of personas and the role they play in conversions. According to Vanessa, focusing only on ranking reports can cause you to miss important information. That said, I've already pre-ordered Vanessa's new book and strongly suggest you do too.

- As always, Matt Cutts was truly entertaining during the "Interactive Site Review: Organic Focus" session at PubCon. (Tip, if your site is obviously spamming don't sign it up for review! ;) ) I know Barry has been giving Matt a hard time about not attending conferences lately but, Matt really went above and beyond even shaving a spammy head or two at PubCon 2009 :).

- Greg Hartnett, Michael McDonald, Barry Schwartz, Lee Odden and Loren Baker teamed up for "Search Bloggers: What's Hot and Trending?". This session was a jam packed PowerPoint free dialogue between the best in the industry.

- Saving the best for last, my favorite session was "Super Session : Search Engines and Webmasters." Shawn from Microsoft was up first and talked about Bing's recent changes. He demonstrated Bing's hover preview feature and talked about the new and improved MSNBOT 2.0b According to Shawn, Steve Blamer expects to win search and acquire 51% market share with Bing. After Shawn, Matt Cutts presented Google's "State of the Index." Matt talked a lot about the importance of site speed and Google's new social search experiment. He suggests digging deeper into Google Webmaster Tools as well as subscribing to the blog and YouTube channel.

PubCon was a great conference and I strongly suggest it to anyone interested in interactive marketing. Thanks again to Neil Marshall and the PubCon staff, Barry Schwartz and Search Discovery Inc..