Today I attended 3 of the 4 sessions available on the advanced organic track at the Search Engine Strategies conference.  The one I missed was SEO through Blogs and Feeds because room filled up so fast that I literally couldn’t get in the door.  It seems like most of the sessions I’ve been in have been standing room only.  Are companies starting to take SEO more seriously?    

The Sitemaps & URL Submission track was informative as there are some new features across the engines.  For one, you can now list your sitemap or sitemap index file in your robots.txt file for auto-discovery by all the major search engines rather than submitting it to each engine separately.  You do, however, still need to submit it to Google to get the diagnostics. 

The next session was about Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues.  A lot of recurring questions here.  One that came up for a second time was how would the engines treat content that is targeted at two different countries but in the same language.  The response was that the engines would not consider it duplicate as they would see that (based on country domain or local IP) the content was targeted at two different audiences.  Unfortunately, that only exacerbates the international content issues as now our country-specific content is at risk of being seen as duplicate and being removed from the indexes entirely. 

Finally, I attended the Robots.txt Summit which was more of an interactive forum.  The engines all had representatives talk about the current Robots.txt file capabilities as well as ideas they’d gathered for enhancing its functionality.  Some of the features that people wanted to see included:  better authentication directives, time zone directives for when you preferred the crawlers spider your site, instructions to ignore navigational or irrelevant (e.g. duplicate or required legal jargon) text on a page, crawl rate directives that are easy to understand (versus current crawl delays that most people don’t understand well enough how to implement effectively and a standardized robots.txt protocol.  

At the top of my wish list for robots.txt would be the capability to tell the engines when to strip off tracking parameters and/or dynamic parameters or session IDs from the URL and then to consolidate all link popularity from all variations to the base URL.   Several others voiced their desire for such functionality as well so it appeared that it would get some attention for future enhancements.   

It was great to see the engines solicit feedback from companies about how they can provide more options to allow webmasters to give information to them that will result in more efficient crawls and indexing.