Last week I was in Las Vegas for PubCon, a conference for publishers, and I wanted to share the slides from my main presentation:
When I get a chance, I’ll also re-create the talk on video and share the video with you, but in the mean time Lisa Barone did a nice live write-up and coverage of the Q&A.
It’s always nice to see SEOs and webmasters that I’ve gotten to know from search conferences. For example, one night featured the traditional SEO Werewolf game, except with blackhats as the werewolves and whitehats as the villagers. Somehow in the middle of that party, we decided that if someone submitted a spam site during my site review session, I could shave Evan Fishkin’s head.
Sure enough, someone submitted a spammy site for review, and you can view the resulting haircut in this image gallery. Afterwards, I asked if anyone else wanted their head shaved, and Nelson James volunteered. I shaved hair while people asked questions, and it was a lot of fun:
Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.
I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.
Thanks for all the positive feedback that people have given on Caffeine. If you still want to give us feedback on Caffeine, see the original Google Caffeine post for how to do that.
One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data.
In the past, Google Docs would let you export a single doc at a time, but Google Operating System runs down exactly how to batch export your Google Docs. For each type of document (text document, presentation, spreadsheet, etc.) you can choose what file format to get.
I had about 81 personal docs (~13MB) and it only took about a minute to bundle the files up into a .zip file that my browser automatically downloaded. If you have a ton of files, you can choose to get an email when the .zip file is ready.
I really like this feature. By making it easy to leave Google, I think people are actually less likely to leave Google. Or as Jason Calacanis noted lots of people are happy just to get a backup.
By the way, read more about how Google lets you export your data at http://www.dataliberation.org/ if you’re interested.
This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners.
We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to all 150+ videos (over 11 hours of information). That’s important because for movies with captions, you can translate the captions into different languages. Now if you want to watch my videos but see the captions in Portuguese or German or Turkish, you can!
The second way we celebrated is with a fun video. As you may know, I recently lost a bet with my team and they shaved off all my hair. Click to see the 30 second explanation of why I’m bald. But you may not know that my team recorded a video as I lost my hair. Now you can watch and laugh along too:
I hope that you enjoy the video! You may want to subscribe to the webmaster video channel to see more free webmaster videos in the future.
We made a video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. You can watch it if you want:
This answers a couple questions such as: - Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url? - How do I make that url disappear from Google?
