The foxiest lady of search, Vanessa Fox the product manager for Google Webmaster Central graced me with her presence again.  Here are some topics we covered and we also took live questions from the chatroom.

-Change in handling of subdomains on Google with the site: operator
-What is the best way to pour concrete
-Overview of how Google is structured (Mountain View office, Kirkland office, search, webmaster, adwords and adsense teams)
-Are Google employees given secret pills to counteract alcohol at conferences
-Difference between Google’s webmaster tools crawl error notices and Adsense site diagnostics error notices
-How many Kirkland ladies have the hots for Rand
-Google’s handling of robots.txt wildcards
-Why did they think it was ok to bring buffy back from heaven

As I was poking around the source code of a site I saw this line

!— 3 links expires 9/30/07—

If I was a search bot I think that just might tip me off that those links were bought and should not be fully trusted.  It is no secret that I am not an angel in the eyes of the search engines, but even I have to say that it just too lazy/stupid when someone puts the actual link expiration in a comments tag.

PS - If you are interested in buying links make sure you take a look at that sites source code.  The link should not be using javascript or iframes.  Also it is generally a good idea to take a site they are already linking to and see if it shows up in the Yahoo backlink search.  Better shut my mouth now before Captain Sprite comes flying along

In this online industry where 99% of the time you deal with people in cyberspace and not face to face, trust has always been a big issue.  Sugarrae had a great post talking about what makes you follow and trust someone.  The idea of transference (ie you trust your friend’s friends) made me see potential for an interesting game.

The game is called the Trust Transference Game .   The rules are simple.  I name someone I trust, that person must then name a person they trust, and so on and so on.  Please no repeating of names and you do not need to name the person you trust the most. 

You can post your explanation of why you trust that person on your blog and make that person feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that there is at least one person other than their mother that trusts them. I’ll keep updating this thread with all of the responses.  At the end of the game we’ll have a long (and probably weird) line of transference, it should be interesting to see where it leads.

Greg Niland
  trusts
Rae Hoffman
  trusts
Michael Gray
  trusts
Todd Malicoat
  trusts
Andy Hagans
  trusts
Cameron Olthuis
  trusts
Jarrod Hunt
  trusts
Chris Hooley
  trusts
Andrew Wee (honorary mention - SEOmoz peeps)
trusts
Planet Andrea
  trusts
Shoemoney
trusts
?????????

As I was playing around at www.MSN.com I randomly searched for ”sdsdf“.  I like to check out weird keywords like that just to see what the search engines are doing with non-competitive keywords.  Let me tell you I am glad I did that this time.  Read the rest of this entry »