What's Vanessa Fox worth?

We were lucky enough to have some Googlers over for SMX London. One of my favourite quotes from the conference came from a Google Solutions Engineer.

After Vanessa left... well, we replaced her with about 400 people

Ha-ha! That just shows you how effective caffeine and BlackBerrys are!

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Webmaster Console Down

Google's Webmaster Console seems to have been struggling to quickly verify sites all week.

Right now I would say that 80% of sites in this particular interface aren't verifying when they should be.

It's strange how Google sometimes struggles with things like this. The early Froogle was absolutely awful for grinding to a halt. Blogger, too, has had its fair share of problems.

Orkut, bless it's heart, has the honour of being the least stable Google offering.

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Your page is too old for Googlebot

Google's Webmaster Tools offering is great but I only wish they'd give me a snappier URL for it. No. Wait. I only wish they'd give us an MMC like interface for multiple users. I think I'd better stop my Google wish-list here!

I work on a number of significant news sites. The Webmaster Console (The Artist Formally Known as Sitemap XML) has added extras for sites included by Google News. You knew that. Have you seen what the added extras look like? Have you seen the Google News specific errors?

Allow me. One of the Google News specific errors is date too old as Google (currently) only collects news content which is less than 4 days old.

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Broken - but still good

One of my favourite quotes from Google is:

A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

I like that quote because it makes a lot of sense and is easy to understand. Any changes we recommend for SEO also clearly have benefits for users too. It may just be the case that the search engine involvement completes the business case required for making the change.

Google's Sitemap XML program broke the (rule of) thumb. It was just for search engines.

Adam Lasnik has posted a very good Webmaster Central blog post on duplicate content. In particular, I'm pleased to see a tip to be consistent with internal linking. I don't understand why webmasters insist on linking to /index.html when / would work. If you insist on linking to index.html it means is that your upgrade to PHP will involve awkward URL rewriting rules.

Adam also writes;

Rather than letting our algorithms determine the "best" version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don't want us to index the printer versions of your site's articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.

Hmm. Tough one to squeeze into "I'm comfortable describing this as a non-search engine specific strategy to a competitor" box. Google's broken their rule of thumb too. Clearly, though, this is talking about excluding pages from the index which is a far cry from trying to manipulate the algorithm into ranking you higher. Sometimes the best rules of thumbs are those you can define by the exceptions and perhaps this is one.

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