SES NYC 2006, Day 1

So I get my conference bag, and immediately I did what I always do: look through the included material for spam sites. I found one spam company pretty quickly. 🙂

The conference has been a blast so far. Last night, I hung out with SEOs until 3:30 a.m. talking about search and the different spamfighting approaches of different search engines. Today, three of us Googlers showed up and shared lunch with several hundred folks (seating capacity looks like 500-600 people, and there was an overflow room). Barry and colleagues covered about 15 sessions today, but not our session, strangely enough. But Nathan Weinberg was there and writes about some of the questions. Vanessa Fox gave a live demo of Sitemaps using Google as an example, which was pretty sweet. If you’re not enrolled in Sitemaps yet, I highly recommend it.

Fun moments so far:
– Meeting someone who was wearing a pedometer because I had mentioned that I was trying to wear a pedometer. I knew that people listened to me about SEO, but didn’t expect anyone to listen about anything else. 🙂
– Walking around in NYC, I noticed that an LED ticker sign had crashed. Instead of displaying news, it was displaying the bottom of a PC screen. Here’s a three-foot icon:

Crashed Ticker

I think that says “Free AOL & Unlimited” or something. 🙂

Okay, I’m going to see if I can pick any more SEOs’ brains tonight before heading to the “Pundits on Search” panel at 9 a.m. tomorrow. I’ve asked my colleagues to pull me away after 1 a.m. Let’s see if I find out anything useful if I drink Sprite while they drink vodka. 🙂

19 Responses to SES NYC 2006, Day 1 (Leave a comment)

  1. Speaking of spammers… I just read this article about blog spam etc.

    http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124822,00.asp

    Chris

  2. > Okay, I’m going to see if I can pick any more SEOs’ brains tonight before heading to the “Pundits on Search” panel at 9 a.m. tomorrow. I’ve asked my colleagues to pull me away after 1 a.m. Let’s see if I find out anything useful if I drink Sprite while they drink vodka.

  3. Matt, you know the types of questions all the webmasters want to ask you, but what do you want to know???

  4. Fair play to you Matt, staying up untill 3:30am, I can’t shift the jet lag, in bed at 10pm (mostly against my will) and up bright and early at 5am with nothing to do but look around the blogs.

    Got a small Q for you,

    Vanessa didn’t really answer the question about how many pages can be on your XML sitemap?

    I also had another question but the season run out of time.

    If I have old pages on my site and don’t include them in my google sitemap, will google still visit these pages and return them in the SERP’s?

    Looking forward to day two. Rock on!

  5. I’m going to see if I can pick any more SEOs’ brains

    I guess you are talking about NLP, very interesting science. Did you read about it or did you study it?

  6. I’ll be there today. Should be a lot of fun.

  7. Are you sure that image is not of the mothership coming in for a landing? 😉

  8. So far the Web Pundits session from this morning has been one of my favorites. Thanks for a great session!

  9. >Let’s see if I find out anything useful if I drink Sprite while they drink vodka.

  10. Well Done Matt for staying on the Sprite, there was a few panalists that had a few more “sprites” than yourself.

    Aren’t bloggers a pain?, the bloody noise they make when your trying to listen to speakers.

    Good talk on the Dup content, I’ve learned the hard way.
    Who was the dude promoting “Good” dub content and cloaking.

  11. It says “Free AOL and Unlimited Folders”.

    Which is short for “We’ll use our ESP-like abilities to allow you to put as many folders as you like on your hard drive, as long as your hard drive doesn’t fill up. However, for every folder you add, we will send you one of those stupid AOL CDs which are useless other than as drink coasters.”

    (Yes, I actually use AOL CDs for drink coasters.)

  12. Aaron – No, that was no mother ship. It was indeed a windows icon for “Free AOL & Unlimited…” like most new PC’s have. There were other icons as well around the building, which was actually a set for a local sports program. It was quite funny.

    Matt, I get relegated to just being “someone”. Well, I guess that’s what the comments are for. 😉

  13. Matt, great to meet you and thanks again. I wonder how many miles you could put on the pedometer staying up til after 3 every day. Sorry you can’t join us for the tour, maybe next time. Pretty cool your mom teaches English in China , perhaps she can also join us.

  14. Hi Boydie,

    Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to read through these comments until now.

    A Sitemap can list up to 50,000 URLs and be up to 10MB.
    http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html#sitemapFileRequirements

    If you have more URLs than that, you can break them into multiple Sitemap files and then list those in a Sitemap index file (which can list up to 1,000 Sitemaps).

    If you have old pages that you don’t include in your Sitemap, Googlebot will likely still visit them by following links.

  15. Matt, I caught those same ticker symbols at SNY and put them in my Flickr stream. Feel free to use them as you see fit.

  16. Thanks Vanessa,

    I’d better start deleting or 301ing the old pages.

  17. To find them I used allinurl:www.site.com

    On the sites showing problems.

    Matt I’ll get in touch properly one day soz for naff email info

  18. One last thing Matt. Don’t just look for IP’s I think some domains keep cropping up again and again. But I working of a tiny amount of data.

  19. I am told that www. and non www. url’s can be call duplicate site and be removed by google for being a copy cat site. example http://www.google.com and google.com are the same site. Will there ever be a day when seach engines notice http://www.url and just url as one site.

    Reason for this question is I list my site using the non www. but some people when that link back to me add the www. to my url and others dont.
    I think this is a big problem for many webmasters who are wanting thier url’s to be as short as possible.

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