Matt Cutts Video Transcription – Session 14: Recap of SES San Jose 2006

OK Everybody! I am back. I am mostly over my cold and my wife is somewhere else tonight. So I get to make a video. Wow!

So, I thought I will give you a recap from my point of view of Search Engine Strategies and sort of cover some of the high-order bits and stuff that I thought was pretty neat.

A lot of people are curious about the industry news. What did the Search Engines announce, or what happened during the week. So, Yahoo announced sitebuilder, which is something that lets you do a free custom search engine for your own site,  Google has something that’s sort of related to that but we rolled out several years ago. So Yahoo for now looks like they have a nicer custom site search, that’s free. They also rolled out authentication in site explorer. So one thing you’ll notice is, you can now prove that you own a site in site explorer and presumably you will be able to do more stuff down the road.
They also turned off the ability to do site: in a domain on Yahoo. So a lot of people missed that during the conference. Its now a forced redirect to Yahoo’s siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. So, you’ll have to login if you want to do a site: search on Yahoo now. You might be able to do a ‘-a’, ‘-the’ to get around that. But it’s pretty clear that they want to shunt most of the people doing the SEO kind of research to that one site and leave the main site for the regular searchers.

So, what did Google announce? Well, we rebranded and renamed sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools and there is new Google webmaster blog, the sitemaster blog has been renamed. So lot of stuff has been reorganised, so its all in one spot,  and one place you can go to. There is also the refresh of the supplemental results, which is kind of nice. People who were complaining about results being from about 2005, I believe, by the end of the month will have those new fresher supplemental results everywhere. But the supplemental results are basically, mostly in the April, May, June, July time frame,  The earliest drop I know of is in February, so I know a lot of people are happy with the refresh of the supplemental results.

We also released a click fraud report. Kind of interesting. The auditing page clicks session was a kind of  ?? on the burner. Guess what, you had to be there. Lot of fun. If you don’t want to read the 17 page report, I would just read the appendix, where they sort of talk about mathematically impossible things and give some concrete examples. But it is a pretty interesting report, if you want to read it.

Microsoft, didn’t really announce much and I actually support that. I don’t think Search Engines should try to roll stuff on a conference schedule, becuase then all the events get squashed into one  you sort of get lost in the noise. So I think its a not a bad idea to roll stuff out when its ready and not worry so much about launching during a conference, trying to get a big boost because of the press. So, all other search engines, including Google, Don’t launch anything during the conferences. make life more mellow for everybody.

Probably the biggest industry news that happened was inadvertent. And that was becuase AOL accidentally, well semi-accidentally leaked queries for hundreds of thousands of users and million of queries and stuff like that. It was done in good faith, the researchers wanted to provide data to people to learn more about how people search with search engines. But it took about a day before people realized now that it can be tied to individual searchers and stuff like that. So, people probably heard the follout from that over  the last couple of weeks, so I don’t need to talk about that.

It was an interesting conference because I got to meet a few people for the first time. I got to meet ?? Becker, Jason Dowdle, Shawn Hogan, Jim Hedger, Steve Bryant from eWeek. I enjoyed meeting everybody there. I enjoyed talking to a lot of people, from the lady from netshops to the guy I shared lunch with. It was a lot of fun as far as lot of talking to lot of web masters. People over there that I didn’t get to talk to but I would have really liked to talk to, Lisa Browney, I don’t know how to say it,…(there a few other names, difficult to get spelling right, so omitting them).

Other things that happened, it was actually a conference in which there is a lot of changes that happened. Sounds like
Andy Beal  is moving to a different spot. Mike Grehan is moving to a different spot. This is one of my favorites, nobody else I think noticed this. Jeffrey McManus who is Yahoo search developer or something like that. He left Yahoo. If you are not familiar with the name, he is the guy that said, Google Maps API smelt like wet burnt dog hair or something like that. So, he is no longer at Yahoo. I think he is consulting now. So, if you want to get good consulting, I am sure you can talk to Jeffrey McManus.

Kanoodle, something happened with them. They moved to seevast or something like that. And at first I thought it was something like a name change, but evidently, they have something with Moniker or Moniker’s naming page stuff.  I didn’t get to talk to Monte or ..(name not clearly audible) of Moniker and find out what knoodle is upto. But, that’s kind of interesting.

Probably the biggest change, that I thought was entertaining was Niall Kennedy left Microsoft, which was kind of funny moment because it started out that we were going to have search engine blogger round table. and I think Robert Scoble was scheduled to be on the panel and he left Microsoft. and so, Niall Kennedy was scheduled to take his spot. And then he announced that he was going to leave Microsoft, and he was leaving like three days after this panel. So there was atleast one point where I was looking at Niall and somebody from Microsoft talking. I couldn’t get what they were saying but I was imagining the Microsoft PR guy going, “You are going to be Cool, alright?” and Niall like, “Yes, yes I am going to be cool”. And he was. He did a great job. he told a really funny story about international soccer and how you can avoid incidents by thinking about the impact of your words. So, he was a lot of fun. Being on a panel with him along with Gary Price and Jeremy Zawodney.

Other fun moments. I missed, I can’t believe this I missed Danny Sullivan in lederhosen. He lost a bet with Thomas Bindle and there are pictures all over the web. Just Do a Google search or some other image search you should be able to find Danny Sullivan in lederhosen.

I got to talk to a lot of metrics companies and grill them about various things. I still got a few ?? to talk about metrics. Picking brains with webmasters, of course, they picked my brain a little bit. Its always good to talk to web masters, I enjoyed that a lot.

It was fun to meet some Cuttlettes. So,  Jessica and Audry from an SEO down in LA. It was really nice to meet you. Lyndsay,  it was nice to meet you as well.  Didn’t make my wife jealous at all. No sir. No marital problems there, I’ll tell you. But it was a lot of fun meeting a ton of  people, including a couple of  Cuttlettes.

I got a killer cold, which I am now over, so that pretty good. And there was one heart stopping moment where, Danny was talking to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. He did a Q&A on the third day of the conference. And, Sergey showed up at SES back in 99 or 2000 and he said something like, there is no such thing as search engine spam. Which, back then was basically true because Google was using pagerank and links and anchor text  in ways that nobody ever thought of before and it was very hard to spam Google and nobody worked on it, because Google was really small.  But that quote haunted Google or atleast webspam for a while. “There is no such thing as spam”, said Sergey. So there was one moment when Danny Sullivan asked Eric Schmidt. He said, “Oh all this link stuff, people are always going to be trying to abuse it. Do you want to just go ahead and say now that everything is OK, there is no such thing as spam, you can do whatever you want”. He didn’t say exactly like that, but I still have this heart stopping moment. I was like “Eric, say the right thing, say the right thing..”. And he did a fantastic job, heart attack avoided. ..It was really a neat affair there and talk about the importance of web masters and communication and stuff like that.

So, it was a lot of fun. it was a good conference. I am going to be out of conferences until may be Web Waster World, Vegas in November. So, I am looking forward to some quiet time at home and just working on spam and stuff like that. But it was a lot of fun and if I got to meet you at the conference, I am glad I did. and if I did not, I hope I meet you in a future conference.