Ask the Search Engines at SMX West 09

Third class of the day!
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speakers: Arnab Bhattacharjee, Senior Director of Yahoo! Search Technology & Engineering, Yahoo!; Dude, Microsoft; Keith Hogan, Vice President of Search Technology, Ask.com; Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru, Google.

My notes:

• I purposely rearranged my schedule so I could attend this session because Matt twitted that he would be making a special announcement. Needlessly to say, it was worth it!
• <link rel="canonical" value="http://www.kandiandkeith.com/smxwest09/blog/" />
• What does this mean? It means that Google, Yahoo and Live Search have all agreed to follow this hint if you include it in your code. It acts as a 301 redirect. It should be used sparingly and with great thought.
• It can be used for subdomains and for https to http redirects.
• Yahoo can remove tracking urls (ppc urls) from their index to stop inflating index numbers and allow for faster crawlings.
  
• Penalties can be passed from one domain to another.
• With high enough PageRank, the Googlebot will fill out forms and perform JavaScript to dig deeper into your website.
• Big threat in 2009 - Hacking websites!!!
• Matt Cutts said that the Google team watches FriendFeed so it's time to check it out.
• Check out the Search Engine Land article with useful links
  

Three main notes:

1. Canonical link element
2. Yahoo and Live Search now support nofollow
3. Google.co.jp - The marketing team at Google Japan decided to buy links and they were caught and penalized for it