Posted by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

I've always loved traveling. Okay, not the flights so much, especially given that I typically travel coach (yes, even for work trips). But getting to learn interesting cultural tidbits, enjoy regional cuisines, and meet new people... it all definitely makes my life richer. Even the little things -- linguistic differences ("How are you going?" in Sydney) and just walking around (pass on the left in the UK!) -- can be fascinating.

So I shouldn't be surprised when my friends tease me about my traveling as a representative of Google's Search Quality team: "Must be really rough!" However, being an active part of conferences actually isn't all glamour and relaxation.

Here's a glimpse of the reality:

• Sometimes (though thankfully rarely) I get metaphorically used as a human punching bag.
• There's no pause button on my corp and personal e-mail accounts. Days at conferences = LOTS of email to catch up on!
• And on a related note, what's with the no-wifi nonsense?! I have Verizon broadband [sic] for my laptop now, but still... ack!
  
• Attending conferences requires an enormous amount of extra time overall. I stubbornly seem to create presentations fresh for each conference, I collaborate with other Googler speakers on their presentations (and vice versa), and I end up with a ton of additional (valuable but time-intense) work from info I glean at the conferences. Based on this and the e-mail reason noted above, I've noticed that each day of conference = five days of combined prep + analysis + implementation.

But here's why I still really like going to conferences:

• I learn a bunch from other speakers. When folks from other search engines or various experts speak, I often think -- hey, that's useful information, or that's a particularly thoughtful way of explaining stuff. I'm still pretty new to the conference-speaking circuit, so every bit I soak up helps!
  
• SEO and webmaster folks are typically rather fun people. :-)
  
• Though I don't always make time for this, it's certainly neat getting to spend some time exploring various cities. Okay, so San Jose doesn't count (it's right next to Google), but I can't wait to check out Toronto (and, likely via a few personal days beforehand, Montreal).
• I learn a great deal from webmasters I chat with. I'm able to go back to my colleagues here and say - hey, this is how our algorithm changes or our guidelines are being perceived, these are challenges we didn't anticipate from our tools, and so on. And it's not just about search; I've gotten thoughtful earfuls about Gmail, Calendar, and practically everything else about Google, and I do my best to relay this feedback to my colleagues in other departments.
• Lastly, seeing someone in person provides a very helpful new perspective on what they're meaning to communicate online. It's easy to misread text on a page, especially when there's no immediate opportunity to follow up with questions. But in person, issues get cleared up on both sides, and that's good for everyone.

Thankfully, it's not just me who's presenting to and chatting with webmasters from Google -- I'd be exhausted, and you'd get quite bored of me. As you can see from the list below, our conference-going is genuinely a team effort: Through this month and June, you'll find Google Search Quality and Webmaster Central folks present at these conferences:

Search Engine Strategies - Xiamen, China - May 25, 26-30

• Jianfei Zhu (Senior Software Engineer): Get a Lesson from Spamming

Search Engine Strategies - Milan, Italy - May 29-30

• Brian White (Technical Program Manager)
  
• Luisella Mazza (Search Quality Analyst)
• Stefano Bezze (Search Quality Associate)
  

American Marketing Association Hot Topics Series - New York, NY - May 25

• Maile Ohye (Senior Developer Support Engineer): Search Engine Marketing
  

Google Developer Day - San Jose, CA (was originally set for Mountain View) - May 31

• Jonathan Simon (Webmaster Trends Analyst)
  
• Maile Ohye (Senior Developer Support Engineer)
  

Search Marketing Expo Advanced - Seattle, WA - June 4-5

• Matt Cutts (Software Engineer): You&A, Personalized Search and Penalty Box
  
• Vanessa Fox (Product Manager, Webmaster Central): Duplicate Content

Search Engine Strategies - Toronto, Canada - June 12-13

• Adam Lasnik: Search Engine Friendly Design and The Worst SEO Myths, Don'ts, and Scams

Searchnomics - Santa Clara, CA - June 27

• Shashi Thakur (Software Engineer): Search Engine Friendly Design
• Greg Grothaus (Software Engineer): Search & Dynamic Web Sites and SEO for Web 2.0
  

* * *

We look forward to seeing many of you in person! But even if you can't or don't want to go to one of the conferences we attend, we welcome your questions, comments, or even just a friendly introduction in our Webmaster Help Group.

Take care, and enjoy your summer, wherever your online or offline travels may take you!

Posted by Vanessa Fox

Yesterday, at Searchology, we unveiled exciting changes in our search results. With universal search, we've begun blending results from more than just the web in order to provide the most relevant and useful results possible. In addition to web pages, for instance, the search results may include video, news, images, maps, and books. Over time, we'll continue to enhance this blending so that searchers can get the exact information they need right from the search results.

This is great news for the searcher, but what does it mean for you, the webmaster? It's great news for you as well. Many people do their searches from web search and aren't aware of our many other tools to search for images, news, videos, maps, and books. Since more of those results may now be returned in web search, if you have content that is returned in these others searches, more potential visitors may see your results.

Want to make sure you're taking full advantage of universal search? Here are some tips:

Google News results
If your site includes news content, you can, submit your site for inclusion in Google News. Once your site is included, you can let us know about your latest articles by submitting a News Sitemap. (Note News Sitemaps are currently available for English sites only.)

News Archive results
If you have historical news content (available for free or by subscription), you can submit it for inclusion in News Archive Search.

Image results
If your site includes images, you can opt-in to enhanced Image search in webmaster tools, which will enable us to gather additional metadata about your images using our Image Labeler. This helps us return your images for the most relevant queries. Also ensure that you are fully taking advantage of the images on your site.

Local results
If your site is for a business in a particular geographic location, you can provide information to us using our Local Business Center. By providing this information, you can help us provide the best, locally relevant results to searchers both in web search and on Google Maps.

Video results
If you have video content, you can host it on Google Video, YouTube, or a number of other video hosting providers. If the video is a relevant result for the query, searchers can play the video directly from the search results page (for Google Video and YouTube) or can view a thumbnail of the video then click over to the player for other hosting providers. You can easily upload videos to Google Video or to YouTube.

Our goal with universal search is to provide most relevant and useful results, so for those of you who want to connect to visitors via search, our best advice remains the same: create valuable, unique content that is exactly what searchers are looking for.

Posted by Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Earlier this year, a bunch of Googlers (Maile, Peeyush, Dan, Adam and I) bunged ourselves across the equator and headed to Sydney, so we could show our users and webmasters that just because you're "down under" doesn't mean you're under our radar. We had a great time getting to know folks at our Sydney office, and an even greater time meeting and chatting with all the people attending Search Summit and Search Engine Room. What makes those 12-hour flights worthwhile is getting the chance to inform and be informed about the issues important to the webmaster community.

One of the questions we heard quite frequently: Should we as webmasters/SEOs/SEMs/users be worried about personalized search?

Our answer: a resounding NO! Personalized search takes each user's search behavior, and subtly tunes the search results to better match their interests over time. For a user, this means that even if you're a lone entomologist in a sea of sports fans, you'll always get the results most relevant to you for the query "cricket". For the webmaster, it allows niche markets that collide on the same search terms to disambiguate themselves based on individual user preferences, and this really presents a tremendous opportunity for visibility. Also, to put things in perspective, search engines have been moving towards some degree of personalization for years; for example, providing country/language specific results is already a form of personalization, just at a coarser granularity. Making it more fine-grained is the logical next step, and helps level the playing field for smaller niche websites which now have a chance to rank well for users that want their content the most.

Another question that popped up a lot: I'm moving my site from domain X to Y. How do I make sure all my hard-earned reputation carries over?

Here are the important bits to think about:

• For each page on domain X, have it 301-redirect to the corresponding page on Y. (How? Typically through .htaccess, but check with your hosting provider).
• You might want to stagger the move, and redirect sub-sections of your site over time. This gives you the chance to keep an eye on the effects, and also gives search engines' crawl/indexing pipelines time to cover the space of redirected URLs.
• http://www.google.com/webmasters is your friend. Keep an eye on it during the transition to make sure that the redirects are having the effect you want.
• Give it time. How quickly the transition is reflected in the results depends on how quickly we recrawl your site and see those redirects, which depends on a lot of factors including the current reputation of your site's pages.
• Don't forget to update your Sitemap. (You are using Sitemaps, aren't you?)
• If possible, don't substantially change the content of your pages at the same time you make the move. Otherwise, it will be difficult to tell if ranking changes are due to the change of content or incorrectly implemented redirects.

Before we sign off, we wanted to shout-out to a couple of the folks at the Sydney office: Lars (one of the original Google Maps guys) gets accolades from all of us jetlagged migrants for donating his awesome Italian espresso machine to the office. And Deepak, thanks for all your tips on what to see and do around Sydney.

Our team at Webmaster Central is always looking for ways to communicate with you, the webmaster community. We do through providing tools that tell you more about your site and let you give us input about your site, talking to you in our discussion forums, reading what you have to say across the blogs and forums on the web, blogging here, and by talking to you in person at conferences. We can't talk to as many of you in person as we can reach through other means, such as this blog, but we find meeting face-to-face to be invaluable.

So, we're very excited about an upcoming conference in our hometown, Seattle -- SMX Advanced, June 4-5. Since it's nearby, many from our team can attend and we're hoping to hear more about what you like and what you'd like to see us do in the coming year. We're participating in two summits at this conference. Summits are a great way to find out exactly what issues you're facing and explore ways we can solve them together. We can weigh the alternatives and make sure we understand the obstacles from your perspective. The recent robots.txt summit was a great opportunity for all the search engines to get together and brainstorm with you, the webmaster. We came away from that with lots of great ideas and a better understanding of what you're looking for most with the evolution of robots.txt. We hope to do the same with the two summits at SMX Advanced.

At the Duplicate Content Summit, I'd love to talk to you about the types of situations you're facing with your site. Are you most concerned about syndicating your content? Using dynamic URLs with changing parameters? Providing content for sites in multiple countries? For each issue, we'll talk about ways we can tackle them. What solutions can we offer that will work best for you? I'm very excited about what we can accomplish at this summit, although I'm not quite as excited about the 9am start time. Fortunately, our party isn't the night before.

At the Penalty Box Summit, Matt Cutts will be on hand to talk to you about all the latest with our guidelines and reinclusion procedures. And he'll want to hear from you. What concerns do you have about the guidelines? How can we better communicate violations to you? Unfortunately, our party is the night before this session, but I'm sure there will be lots of coffee on hand.

And speaking of the party... since conference attendees are coming all the way to Seattle, we thought we should throw one. The Google Seattle/Kirkland office and the Webmaster Central team are hosting SMX After Dark: Google Dance NW on Monday night. We want to say thanks to you for this great partnership, as well as give you the chance to learn more about what we've been up to. We'll have food, drinks, games (Pacman and Dance Dance Revolution anyone?), and music. Talk to the Webmaster Central engineers, as well as engineers from our other Kirkland/Seattle product teams, such as Talk, Video, and Maps. We may even have a dunk tank! Who would you most like to try your hand at dunking?

El pasado 8 y 9 de Marzo asistimos al congreso OJOBuscador en Madrid. Este evento fue muy interesante para nosotros dado que nos dio la oportunidad de escuchar a los ponentes de distintos motores de búsqueda y dialogar con los webmasters acerca de sus principales inquietudes relacionadas con el posicionamiento en buscadores en español. Uno de los puntos que se mencionaron con frecuencia, tanto en las sesiones de posicionamiento como en las charlas informales, fue la desventaja de competir en el mercado SEO donde varias empresas utilizan métodos solapados que van en contra de las directrices oficiales de Google.

Entre las técnicas que hemos observado están las de generar dominios satélite o crear infinidades de páginas irrelevantes con el único objetivo de ganar tráfico en búsquedas que no están necesariamente relacionadas con el contenido del sitio. Otro fenómeno que hemos observado es la continua aparición de dominios que sólo tienen contenido procedente de afiliados sin aportar valor único o relevante.

Vamos a ser más severos con las técnicas previamente mencionadas, porque en Google consideramos que es muy importante no defraudar a los usuarios. Por otra parte, consideramos que la responsabilidad última de los contenidos de un sitio pertenece al webmaster, quien debe velar por su calidad y verificar que sus paginas tengan como finalidad primera satisfacer a los usuarios.

Con el propósito de mejorar la comunicación con la comunidad de webmasters, queremos anunciar que Google a partir de ahora estará presente y participará activamente en el Foro de Google para webmasters.

We were in Madrid

Last 8th and 9th of March we went to the OJOBuscador conference in Madrid. The event was very interesting for us since we had the chance to listen to presentations from the main search engines and to discuss with the webmasters their main concerns regarding Spanish search engine positioning. One key point mentioned frequently both in the SEO sessions and in the informal chats was the disadvantage of working in an SEO market where several companies use sneaky methods that go against the official Webmaster Guidelines.

There are some techniques such as generating satellite domains or creating thousands of irrelevant pages with the sole purpose of gaining traffic in search queries that are not always related to sites' content. Another phenomenon we have observed is the steady influx of domains which only have content from affiliate sites without adding any unique value or relevance.

We are going to be stricter against the techniques previously discussed, as we consider it is very important to avoid deceiving the users. Nevertheless, we think the ultimate responsibility for the contents of a website belongs to the webmaster, who should watch over the site quality and verify that the pages are made for the user.

Aiming to enhance communication with the webmaster community, we would like to announce that going forward Google will participate and monitor the Spanish Webmaster Discussion Forum.

If you're planning to attend the Search Engine Strategies conference next week in New York, be sure to come by and say hi! A whole bunch of us from the Webmaster Central team will be there, looking to talk to you, get your feedback, and answer your questions. Be sure to join us for lunch on Tuesday, April 10th, where we'll spend an hour answering any question you may have. And then come by our other sessions, or find us in the expo hall or the bar.

Tuesday, April 10

11:00am - 12:30pm

Ads in a Quality Score World
Nick Fox, Group Business Product Manager, Ads Quality

12:45 - 1:45

Lunch Q&A with Google Webmaster Central

	Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central
	Trevor Foucher, Software Engineer
	Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst
	Maile Ohye, Sitemaps Developer Support Engineer
	Nikhil Gore, Test Engineer
	Amy Lanfear, Technical Writer
	Susan Mowska, International Test Engineer
	Evan Roseman, Software Engineer

Wednesday, April 11

10:30pm - 12:00pm

Web Analytics & Measuring Success
Brett Crosby, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Sitemaps & URL Submission
Maile Oyhe, Sitemaps Developer Support Engineer

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central

Meet the Search Ad Networks
Brian Schmidt, Online Sales and Operations Manager

3:15pm - 4:30pm

Earning Money from Contextual Ads
Gavin Bishop, GBS Sales Manager, AdSense

4:45pm - 6:00pm

Landing Page Testing & Tuning
Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

robots.txt Summit
Dan Crow, Product Manager

Thursday, April 12

9:00am - 10:15am

Meet the Crawlers
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer

Search Arbitrage Issues
Nick Fox, Group Business Product Manager, Ads Quality

11:00am - 12:15pm

Images & Search Engines
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central

4:00pm - 5:15pm

Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust and Safety

Friday, April 13

12:30pm - 1:45pm

Search Engine Q&A on Links
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer

CSS, Ajax, Web 2.0 and Search Engines
Dan Crow, Product Manager

Last week, I spoke at BlogHer Business about search engine optimization issues. I presented with Elise Bauer, who talked about the power of community in blogging. She made great points about the linking patterns of blogs. Link out to sites that would be relevant and useful for your readers. Comment on blogs that you like to continue the conversation and provide a link back to your blog. Write useful content that other bloggers will want to link to. Blogging connects readers and writers and creates real communities where valuable content can be exchanged. I talked more generally about search and a few things you might consider when developing your site and blog.

Why is search important for a business?
With search, your potential customers are telling you exactly what they are looking for. Search can be a powerful tool to help you deliver content that is relevant and useful and meets your customers' needs. For instance, do keyword research to find out the most common types of searches that are relevant to your brand. Does your audience most often search for "houses for sale" or "real estate"? Check your referrer logs to see what searches are bringing visitors to your site (you can find a list of the most common searches that return your site in the results from the Query stats page of webmaster tools). Does your site include valuable content for those searches? A blog is a great way to add this content. You can write unique, targeted articles that provide exactly what the searcher wanted.

How do search engines index sites?
The first step in the indexing process is discovery. A search engine has to know the pages exist. Search engines generally learn about pages from following links, and this process works great. If you have new pages, ensure relevant sites link to them, and provide links to them from within your site. For instance, if you have a blog for your business, you could provide a link from your main site to the latest blog post. You can also let search engines know about the pages of your site by submitting a Sitemap file. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all support the Sitemaps protocol and if you have a blog, it couldn't be easier! Simply submit your blog's RSS feed. Each time you update your blog and your RSS feed is updated, the search engines can extract the URL of the latest post. This ensures search engines know about the updates right away.

Once a search engine knows about the pages, it has to be able to access those pages. You can use the crawl errors reports in webmaster tools to see if we're having any trouble crawling your site. These reports show you exactly what pages we couldn't crawl, when we tried to crawl them, and what the error was.

Once we access the pages, we extract the content. You want to make sure that what your page is about is represented by text. What does the page look like with Javascript, Flash, and images turned off in the browser? Use ALT text and descriptive filenames for images. For instance, if your company name is in a graphic, the ALT text should be the company name rather than "logo". Put text in HTML rather than in Flash or images. This not only helps search engines index your content, but also makes your site more accessible to visitors with mobile browsers, screen readers, or older browsers.

What is your site about?
Does each page have unique title and meta description tags that describe the content? Are the words that visitors search for represented in your content? Do a search of your pages for the queries you expect searchers to do most often and make sure that those words do indeed appear in your site. Which of the following tells visitors and search engines what your site is about?

Option 1
If you're plagued by the cliffs of insanity or the pits of despair, sign up for one of our online classes! Learn the meaning of the word inconceivable. Find out the secret to true love overcoming death. Become skilled in hiding your identity with only a mask. And once you graduate, you'll get a peanut. We mean it.

Option 2
See our class schedule here. We provide extensive instruction and valuable gifts upon graduation.

When you link to other pages in your site, ensure that the anchor text (the text used for the link) is descriptive of those pages. For instance, you might link to your products page with the text "Inigo Montoya's sword collection" or "Buttercup's dresses" rather than "products page" or the ever-popular "click here".

Why are links important?
Links are important for a number of reasons. They are a key way to drive traffic to your site. Visitors of other sites can learn about your site through links to it. You can use links to other sites to provide valuable information to your visitors. And just as links let visitors know about your site, they also let search engines know about it. Links also tell search engines and potential visitors about your site. The anchor text describes what your site is about and the number of relevant links to your pages are an indicator of how popular and useful those pages are. (You can find a list of the links to your site and the most common anchor text used in those links in webmaster tools.)

A blog is a great way to build links, because it enables you to create new content on a regular basis. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Several people at the BlogHer session asked about linking out to other sites. Won't this cause your readers to abandon your site? Won't this cause you to "leak out" your PageRank? No, and no. Readers will appreciate that you are letting them know about resources they might be interested in and will remember you as a valuable source of information (and keep coming back for more!). And PageRank isn't a set of scales, where incoming links are weighted against outgoing ones and cancel each other out. Links are content, just as your words are. You want your site to be as useful to your readers as possible, and providing relevant links is a way, just as writing content is, to do that.

The key is compelling content
Google's main goal is to provide the most useful and relevant search results possible. That's the key thing to keep in mind as you look at optimizing your site. How can you make your site the most useful and relevant result for the queries you care about? This won't just help you in the search results, which after all, are just the means to the end. What you are really interested in is keeping your visitors happy and coming back. And creating compelling and useful content is the best way to do that.

G'day Webmasters! Google Webmaster Central is excited to be heading to Sydney for Search Summit and Search Engine Room on March 1-2 and 20-21, respectively.

In addition to our coverage of topics in bot obedience and site architecture, we'll also provide a clinic for building Sitemaps, and chances to "chew the fat" with the Aussies in the "Google Breakfast" and "Google Webmaster Central Q&A." Our Search Evangelist, Adam Lasnik, will lead a fun session in "Living the Non 9-5 Life, Tips for Achieving Balance, Sanity...", where mostly, we hope to learn from you.

Search Summit

Thursday, March 1st
Site Architecture, CSS and Tableless Design 14:45 - 15:30
Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager

Friday, March 2nd
Bot Obedience 09:45 - 10:00
Dan Crow, Product Manager, Crawl Systems

Web 2.0 & Search 11:15 - 12:00
Dan Crow, Product Manager, Crawl Systems

Google Linking Clinic 12:00 - 12:45
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Lunch with Google Webmaster Central 12:45 -13:30

Sitemap Clinic 13:30 - 14:15
Maile Ohye, Developer Support Engineer

Google Webmaster Central Q&A 14:15 - 15:00

Living the Non 9-5 Life, Tips for Achieving Balance, Sanity... 15:00 - 15:45
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Search Engine Room

Tuesday, March 20th
Google Breakfast 07:30 - 09:00
Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Don't Be Evil 09:30 - 10:30
Richard Kimber, Managing Director of Sales and Operations

If you're planning to be at Search Engine Strategies London February 13-15, stop by and say hi to one of the many Googlers who will be there. I'll be speaking on Wednesday at the Successful Site Architecture panel and thought I'd offer up some tips for building crawlable sites for those who can't attend.

Make sure visitors and search engines can access the content

• Check the Crawl errors section of webmaster tools for any pages Googlebot couldn't access due to server or other errors. If Googlebot can't access the pages, they won't be indexed and visitors likely can't access them either.
• Make sure your robots.txt file doesn't accidentally block search engines from content you want indexed. You can see a list of the files Googlebot was blocked from crawling in webmaster tools. You can also use our robots.txt analysis tool to make sure you're blocking and allowing the files you intend.
• Check the Googlebot activity reports to see how long it takes to download a page of your site to make sure you don't have any network slowness issues.
• If pages of your site require a login and you want the content from those pages indexed, ensure you include a substantial amount of indexable content on pages that aren't behind the login. For instance, you can put several content-rich paragraphs of an article outside the login area, with a login link that leads to the rest of the article.
• How accessible is your site? How does it look in mobile browsers and screen readers? It's well worth testing your site under these conditions and ensuring that visitors can access the content of the site using any of these mechanisms.

Make sure your content is viewable

• Check out your site in a text-only browser or view it in a browser with images and Javascript turned off. Can you still see all of the text and navigation?
• Ensure the important text and navigation in your site is in HTML, not in images, and make sure all images have ALT text that describe them.
• If you use Flash, use it only when needed. Particularly, don't put all of the text from your site in Flash. An ideal Flash-based site has pages with HTML text and Flash accents. If you use Flash for your home page, make sure that the navigation into the site is in HTML.

Be descriptive

• Make sure each page has a unique title tag and meta description tag that aptly describe the page.
• Make sure the important elements of your pages (for instance, your company name and the main topic of the page) are in HTML text.
• Make sure the words that searchers will use to look for you are on the page.

Keep the site crawlable

• If possible, avoid frames. Frame-based sites don't allow for unique URLs for each page, which makes indexing each page separately problematic.
• Ensure the server returns a 404 status code for pages that aren't found. Some servers are configured to return a 200 status code, particularly with custom error messages and this can result in search engines spending time crawling and indexing non-existent pages rather than the valid pages of the site.
• Avoid infinite crawls. For instance, if your site has an infinite calendar, add a nofollow attribute to links to dynamically-created future calendar pages. Each search engine may interpret the nofollow attribute differently, so check with the help documentation for each. Alternatively, you could use the nofollow meta tag to ensure that search engine spiders don't crawl any outgoing links on a page, or use robots.txt to prevent search engines from crawling URLs that can lead to infinite loops.
• If your site uses session IDs or cookies, ensure those are not required for crawling.
• If your site is dynamic, avoid using excessive parameters and use friendly URLs when you can. Some content management systems enable you to rewrite URLs to friendly versions.

See our tips for creating a Google-friendly site and webmaster guidelines for more information on designing your site for maximum crawlability and usability.

If you will be at SES London, I'd love for you to come by and hear more. And check out the other Googlers' sessions too:

Tuesday, February 13th

Auditing Paid Listings & Clickfraud Issues 10:45 - 12:00
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety

Wednesday, February 14th

A Keynote Conversation 9:00 - 9:45
Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

Successful Site Architecture 10:30 - 11:45
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central

Google University 12:45 - 1:45

Converting Visitors into Buyers 2:45 - 4:00
Brian Clifton, Head of Web Analytics, Google Europe

Search Advertising Forum 4:30 - 5:45
David Thacker, Senior Product Manager

Thursday, February 15th

Meet the Crawlers 9:00 - 10:15
Dan Crow, Product Manager

Web Analytics and Measuring Successful Overview 1:15 - 2:30
Brian Clifton, Head of Web Analytics, Google Europe

Search Advertising Clinic 1:15 - 2:30
Will Ashton, Retail Account Strategist

Site Clinic 3:00 - 4:15
Sandeepan Banerjee, Sr. Product Manager, Indexing

Late in November we were at SES in Paris, where we had the opportunity to meet some of the most prominent figures in the French SEO and SEM market. One of the issues that came up in sessions and in conversations was a certain confusion about how to most effectively increase the link-based popularity of a website. As a result we thought it might be helpful to clarify how search engines treat link spamming to increase a site´s popularity.

This confusion lies in the common belief that there are two ways for optimizing the link-based popularity of your website: Either the meritocratic and long-term option of developing natural links or the risky and short-term option of non-earned backlinks via link spamming tactics such as buying links. We've always taken a clear stance with respect to manipulating the PageRank algorithm in our Quality Guidelines. Despite these policies, the strategy of participating in link schemes might have previously paid off. But more recently, Google has tremendously refined its link-weighting algorithms. We have more people working on Google's link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find. So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build link-based popularity: Classically this involves optimizing your content so that thematically-related or trusted websites link to you by choice. A more recent method is link baiting, which typically takes advantage of Web 2.0 social content websites. One example of this new way of generating links is to submit a handcrafted article to a service such as http://digg.com. Another example is to earn a reputation in a certain field by building an authority through services such as http://answers.yahoo.com. Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.

In French / en Francais

Liens et popularité.
[Translated by] Eric et Adrien, l’équipe de qualité de recherche.

Les 28 et 29 Novembre dernier, nous étions à Paris pour assister à SES. Nous avons eu la chance de rencontrer les acteurs du référencement et du Web marketing en France. L’un des principaux points qui a été abordé au cours de cette conférence, et sur lequel il règne toujours une certaine confusion, concerne l’utilisation des liens dans le but d’augmenter la popularité d’un site. Nous avons pensé qu’il serait utile de clarifier le traitement réservé aux liens spam par les moteurs de recherche.

Cette confusion vient du fait qu’un grand nombre de personnes pensent qu’il existe deux manières d’utiliser les liens pour augmenter la popularité de leurs sites. D’une part, l’option à long terme, basée sur le mérite, qui consiste à développer des liens de manière naturelle. D’autre part, l’option à court terme, plus risquée, qui consiste à obtenir des liens spam, tel les liens achetés. Nous avons toujours eu une position claire concernant les techniques visant à manipuler l’algorithme PageRank dans nos conseils aux webmasters.

Il est vrai que certaines de ces techniques ont pu fonctionner par le passé. Cependant, Google a récemment affiné les algorithmes qui mesurent l’importance des liens. Un plus grand nombre de personnes évaluent aujourd’hui la pertinence de ces liens et corrigent les problèmes éventuels. Désormais, les sites qui tentent de manipuler le Page Rank en vendant des liens peuvent voir leur habilité à transmettre leur popularité diminuer.

Du fait que les moteurs de recherche ne prennent désormais en compte que les liens pertinents, de nouvelles techniques se sont développées pour augmenter la popularité d’un site Web. Il y a d’une part la manière classique, et légitime, qui consiste à optimiser son contenu pour obtenir des liens naturels de la part de sites aux thématiques similaires ou faisant autorité. Une technique plus récente, la pêche aux liens, (en Anglais « link baiting »), consiste à utiliser à son profit certains sites Web 2.0 dont les contenus sont générés par les utilisateurs. Un exemple classique étant de soumettre un article soigneusement prépare à un site comme http://digg.com. Un autre exemple consiste à acquérir un statut d’expert concernant un sujet précis, sur un site comme http://answers.yahoo.com. Notre conseil est simple : lorsque vous développez votre stratégie d’optimisation, pensez en premier lieu à vos utilisateurs plutôt qu’aux moteurs de recherche. Demandez-vous quelle est la valeur ajoutée de votre contenu pour vos utilisateurs. De cette manière, tout le monde y gagne : investir dans la qualité de votre contenu bénéficie à vos utilisateurs, cela vous permet aussi d’augmenter le nombre et la qualité des liens naturels qui pointent vers votre site, et donc, de mieux cibler vos visiteurs.

En conclusion, bien que les algorithmes récents aient mis un frein aux techniques d’échanges et d’achats de liens au profit des liens naturels, il semble toujours régner une certaine confusion sur la stratégie à adopter. Gardez donc à l’esprit, lorsque vous demandez conseil à votre expert en référencement, que les moteurs de recherche récompensent aujourd’hui le travail apporté au contenu qui attire des liens naturels.

We all had a great time at SES Chicago last week, answering questions and getting feedback.

One of the sessions I participated in was Images and Search Engines, and the panelists had great information about using images on your site, as well as on optimizing for Google Image search.

Ensuring visitors and search engines know what your content is about
Images on a site are great -- but search engines can't read them, and not all visitors can. Make sure your site is accessible and can be understood by visitors viewing your site with images turned off in their browsers, on mobile devices, and with screen readers. If you do that, search engines won't have any trouble. Some things that you can do to ensure this:

• Don't put the bulk of your text in images. It may sound simple, but the best thing you can do is to put your text into well, text. Reserve images for graphical elements. If all of the text on your page is in an image, it becomes inaccessible.
• Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as "picture1" or "logo" doesn't provide much information about the image. "Charting the path of stock x" and "Company Y" give more details.
• Don't overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don't stuff it with extra keywords.
• It's important to use alt text for any image on your pages, but if your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.
• Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

Taking advantage of Image search
The panelists pointed out that shoppers often use Image search to see the things they want to buy. If you have a retail site, make sure that you have images of your products (and that they can be easily identified with alt text, headings, and textual descriptions). Searchers can then find your images and get to your site.

One thing that can help your images be returned for results in Google Image search is opting in to enhanced image search in webmaster tools. This enables us to use your images in the Google Image Labeler, which harnesses the power of the community for adding metadata to your images.

Someone asked if we have a maximum number of images per site that we accept for the Image Labeler. We don't. You can opt in no matter how many, or how few, images your site has.

Update: More information on using images can be found in our Help Center. 

If you're planning to be at SES Chicago this week, be sure to stop by and say hi to the many Googlers who are coming out to brave the cold and snow. Many of us will be on hand at the booth, speaking at sessions, and wandering the halls. Check out Search Engine Land for tips on how to spot some of us and be sure to catch our sessions:

Monday, December 4th

Drive traffic to your site with Google
Jessica Ewing, Product Manager, Google Gadgets
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central
Shashi Seth, Lead Product Manager, Custom Search Egnine

Lunch with Google Webmaster Central
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central
Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools
Trevor Foucher, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer
Maile Ohye, Developer Support Engineer

Tuesday, December 5th

Bulk Submit 2.0
Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools

Domaining and Address Bar-Driven Traffic
Hal Bailey, Strategic Partner Manager

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Bot Obedience Course
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central

Meet the Search Ad Networks
Gretchen Howard, Online Sales and Operations Manager

Meet the Mobile Search Engines
Sumit Agarwal, Product Manager, Mobile

Wednesday, December 6th

Social Search Overview
Shashi Seth, Product Manager, Custom Search Engine

Images and Search Engines
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central

Vendor Chat on Measuring Success
Paul Botto, Google Analytics

Flash and Search Engines
Dan Crow, Product Manager

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0, and Search Engines
Dan Crow, Product Manager

Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust and Safety

Thursday, December 7th

Meet the Crawlers
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer

Search Engine Q&A on Links
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Thanks for visiting us at WebmasterWorld PubCon in Las Vegas couple weeks ago. Whether it was at the panel sessions, the exhibitor hall, or the Safe Bets event, we had a blast meeting you and sharing with you the many Google products that are available to webmasters to enhance and drive traffic to your site. For those who weren't able to join us, here are answers to some of the top questions that we heard:

Q: How do I increase the visibility of my site in search results?
A: There are many factors that can impact visibility of your site in search results. We outlined just a few tips that can make a big difference to increasing your site's visibility in Google search results. First, you should ensure your site has quality content that is unique. Second, have quality sites link to your site. Third, submit a Sitemap to let us know about all the URLs on your site. Fourth, sign up for a webmaster tools account to get information how about Google sees your site, such as crawl errors, indexing details, and top queries to your site. Lastly, you can visit Webmaster Central and Webmaster Help Center for more webmaster related questions and resources.

Q How much do I have to pay to create a Google Custom Search Engine?
A: Nothing -- it's free. In addition to being able to create your own custom search engine on your site, you can make money on your site using AdSense for Search.

Q: Why is it better to create gadgets rather than create feeds?
A: First, gadgets are much more flexible. As a publisher, you control the format of your content. Second, gadgets are by nature more interactive. They can be built with flash, HTML or AJAX, and are generally much more interesting than feeds. Finally, your users can customize a gadget to their liking, making your content a lot more targeted.

Q: What is this new ad placement feature for AdSense and how come I don't see it in my account?
A: Ad placements are publisher-defined groups of ad units that advertisers will see when searching for places where they can target their ads. If you don't yet see it in your AdSense account, it's because we've been slowly rolling out this feature to everyone. This exciting feature will be available to all publishers in the next few weeks, so be sure to keep an eye out.

Q: What's the easiest way to put a searchable Google Map on my web page?
A: Use the Map Search Wizard to design a Google Map for your page. The wizard will write all of the code for you; all you need to do is copy and paste the code into your web page, and your users will see your location on a map.

For more information about Google products for webmasters, you can check them out here:

• Webmaster tools
• Gadgets
• Custom Search Engine
• Code
• AdSense
• AdWords
• Analytics

We also wanted to share some photos from PubCon. If you look closely enough, you may be able to see yourself.


Thanks for stopping by, on behalf of the 25 Googlers in attendance!

As if working at Google isn't already a party, today I'm traveling to Las Vegas for WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006! But instead of talking bets and odds, I'll be talking about how Google can help webmasters improve their sites. I love chatting with webmasters about all the work that goes into creating a great website. Several other Googlers will be there too, so if you have a burning question or just wanna talk about random stuff feel free to stop us and say hi. Besides the sessions, we'll be at the Google booth on Wednesday and Thursday, so come by and introduce yourself.

Here's the list of Google events at PubCon:

Tuesday 14

10:15 - 11:30 SEO and Big Search Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

1:30 - 2:45 PPC Search Advertising Programs Frederick Vallaeys, Senior Product Specialist, AdWords

2:45 - 4:00 PPC Tracking and Reconciliation Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics

Wednesday 15

10:15 - 11:30 Contextual Advertising Optimization Tom Pickett, Online Sales and Operations

11:35 - 12:50 Site Structure for Crawlability Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

1:30 - 3:10 Duplicate Content Issues Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

5:30 - 7:30 Safe Bets From Google Cocktail party!

Thursday 16

11:35 - 12:50 Spider and DOS Defense Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

1:30 - 3:10 Interactive Site Reviews Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

3:30 - 5:00 Super Session Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

You can view this schedule on Google Calendar here:

Come to "Safe Bets From Google" on Wednesday 5:30-7:30pm -- it's a cocktail party where you can mingle with other webmasters and Googlers, learn about other Google products for webmasters, and in typical Google style enjoy some great food and drinks. I'll be there with some other engineers from our Seattle office. Don't miss it!

Tune into Webmaster Radio Thursday, August 31 at 1 pm Pacific to hear Matt Cutts and me take over GoodKarma while GoodROI (Greg Niland), the program's regular host, is on vacation. We'll talk about a little of everything, including giving Danny Sullivan career advice (if he ever decides to get out of search -- which we hope he never does -- he can always pursue a career in song), Google's handling of words with accented characters, display date changes in Google cached pages, and the not-so-nice side of SEO.

And if you missed last week's show, check out the podcast. Danny Sullivan and I explained that everything you need to know about search marketing, you can learn by watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you heard the show and are worried about Danny's favorite espresso machine shop, don't be. They're doing OK after all.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hi at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose last week!

I had a great time meeting people and talking about our new webmaster tools. I got to hear a lot of feedback about what webmasters liked, didn't like, and wanted to see in our Webmaster Central site. For those of you who couldn't make it or didn't find me at the conference, please feel free to post your comments and suggestions in our discussion group. I do want to hear about what you don't understand or what you want changed so I can make our webmaster tools as useful as possible.

Some of the highlights from the week:

This year, Danny Sullivan invited some of us from the team to "chat and chew" during a lunch hour panel discussion. Anyone interested in hearing about Google's webmaster tools was welcome to come and many did -- thanks for joining us! I loved showing off our product, answering questions, and getting feedback about what to work on next. Many people had already tried Sitemaps, but hadn't seen the new features like Preferred domain and full crawling errors.

One of the questions I heard more than once at the lunch was about how big a Sitemap can be, and how to use Sitemaps with very large websites. Since Google can handle all of your URLs, the goal of Sitemaps is to tell us about all of them. A Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs and should be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. But if you have more URLs than this, simply break them up into several smaller Sitemaps and tell us about them all. You can create a Sitemap Index file, which is just a list of all your Sitemaps, to make managing several Sitemaps a little easier.

While hanging out at the Google booth I got another interesting question: One site owner told me that his site is listed in Google, but its description in the search results wasn't exactly what he wanted. (We were using the description of his site listed in the Open Directory Project.) He asked how to remove this description from Google's search results. Vanessa Fox knew the answer! To specifically prevent Google from using the Open Directory for a page's title and description, use the following meta tag:

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP">

My favorite panel of the week was definitely Pimp My Site. The whole group was dressed to match the theme as they gave some great advice to webmasters. Dax Herrera, the coolest "pimp" up there (and a fantastic piano player), mentioned that a lot of sites don't explain their product clearly on each page. For instance, when pimping Flutter Fetti, there were many instances when all the site had to do was add the word "confetti" to the product description to make it clear to search engines and to users reaching the page exactly what a Flutter Fetti stick is.

Another site pimped was a Yahoo! Stores web site. Someone from the audience asked if the webmaster could set up a Google Sitemap for their store. As Rob Snell pointed out, it's very simple: Yahoo! Stores will create a Google Sitemap for your website automatically, and even verify your ownership of the site in our webmaster tools.

Finally, if you didn't attend the Google dance, you missed out! There were Googlers dancing, eating, and having a great time with all the conference attendees. Vanessa Fox represented my team at the Meet the Google Engineers hour that we held during the dance, and I heard Matt Cutts even starred in a music video! While demo-ing Webmaster Central over in the labs area, someone asked me about the ability to share site information across multiple accounts. We associate your site verification with your Google Account, and allow multiple accounts to verify ownership of a site independently. Each account has its own verification file or meta tag, and you can remove them at any time and re-verify your site to revoke verification of a user. This means that your marketing person, your techie, and your SEO consultant can each verify the same site with their own Google Account. And if you start managing a site that someone else used to manage, all you have to do is add that site to your account and verify site ownership. You don't need to transfer the account information from the person who previously managed it.

Thanks to everyone who visited and gave us feedback. It was great to meet you!

Got a burning question about the new Webmaster Central? Eager to give feedback about our Webmaster tools?

Of course, we always appreciate hearing from you in our recently expanded Webmaster Help discussion group. But if you're one of thousands of Webmasters attending the Search Engine Strategies conference ("SES") this week in San Jose, California, we'd particularly enjoy meeting you in person!

Amanda, Vanessa, Matt, and I (along with many other Googlers) will be speaking at various sessions throughout the conference, as well as hanging out in the exhibit hall. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Amanda will also be spending some quality time in the Google booth. On Tuesday night at the Googleplex, a huge mass of Googlers (including all of us) will be demo'ing products and services, answering questions, and enjoying the food, libations, and live music with a broad array of guests from SES at the annual Google Dance.

Interested in learning more details? Check out the post on the main Google blog.