WebmasterWorld Announces Search Conference 9

WebmasterWorld is holding their next conference in New Orleans, June 21-24. This one should be bigger better and hotter. hehe

Book your flights and hotel reservations now. This hotel only has around 750 rooms, so you'll have to book early not later.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/ra.cgi?f=99&d=4550&url=http://www.parkplaza.com/neworleansla/ 1500 Canal Street, New Orleans Louisiana 70112, US Reservations: direct: 1-504-522-4500 Or national: (800) 814-7000

WebmasterWorld announced today that the ninth World Search Conference will be held in New Orleans June 21-24, 2005. The Internet marketing conference will be comprised of multiple tracks focused on search engines, affiliates & advertising, and webmasters & e-commerce.
Brett Tabke, CEO of WebmasterWorld.com said, "With over 70 leading industry speakers, sponsors from the top tier search engines, and a classic PubCon, our November Las Vegas event pulled in over 1200 attendees."

Helpful Links

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/

What a Search Engine Should Do

Following the Money Keywords
The need for diversity in anchor text is elementary and I'm surprised the search engines haven't jumped on it before. I mean, if you have a boatload of inbound links that say "money keyword" you don't need a bloodhound to sniff out someone trying to rank for that.

The perfect search engine should be impervious to human attempts to game it (no kidding, right?). But further, the perfect search engine of the future will not have a symbiotic relationship with webmasters having to conform their web pages to a search engines standards.

Sharing the toys
The big flaw in search engines today is that they are heavily reliant on webmasters writing content in a way that machines can understand the meaning. Anyone who has coded a page so that it showed contextually relevant AdSense ads can attest to the wild misinterpretations that can occur.

So unless a webmaster is writing content, crafting navigational links, and designing web pages with machines in mind, the ostensibly useful content may likely go unnoticed because search engines have great difficulty identifying relevant pages.

Anchor text analysis was supposed to free the search engines from being manipulated by the webmasters but that experiment only led to the creation of a new industry focused on the creation of more inbound links. The result is that not only are the search engines are still reliant on webmasters to help them identify relevant pages, but because of the new link creation industry they inadvertently help create, they are now relying on webmasters to help them solve their problem with link manipulation.

The recent nofollow attribute is a perfect example of the search engines seeking a convenient partnership with webmasters. Previously, this convenient pact was called Search Engine Friendly Design. Unfortunately, that leaves a great many websites designed by people who design strictly for people (and not for search engines) out in the cold. It was a dirty deal for any search engine wishing to return accurate results.

The direction I believe search engines are moving to is to lessen their dependence on the webmaster so that it doesn't matter if a website is flash and that it wouldn't matter if it's consciously written with keywords in mind (no copy writer should have to think about the keywords used, they should write for the user).

Hit the road Jack!
That's the direction I believe Google is headed and has aspired to, to be released from dependence on the webmaster and be able to return accurate pages that do not necessarily have the keywords in their pages (because many webmasters write for users and not search engines).

What does that mean for you? More analysis.

A Word About Reciprocal Links

A commonplace about reciprocal links is that there are quality reciprocal link exchange campaigns and then there are the spammy automated ones that clog your inbox with ridiculous requests. In discussions of link requests three points of view emerge:

1. Most people send out high quality reciprocal link requests
2. Most people say they receive poor quality reciprocal link requests
3. A lot of people are quiet on the issue of bad/good link exchange requests

There goes the link neighborhood...
With the amount of trash requests out there I can understand how the perception of email link exchange requests has turned negative. Many people can't recall the last time they received a decent link exchange request. Reading a reciprocal link request email has become stressful moment, like getting cut off in traffic.

Reality Check
Yet I have a problem with the position some people take that their link exchange requests are of a higher quality than others. It is in fact unfounded to believe that a reciprocal link is a Google approved technique for promoting a website.

Google is strangely silent on the subject
When you read the Google guidelines for webmasters with an open mind, it becomes clear that Google does not explicitly encourage reciprocal link exchanges. The word reciprocal never appears in the Google Webmaster FAQs. And the only time the phrase "link exchange" occurs is within a statement discouraging webmasters from "joining a link exchange or `free for all' link program..."

In light of the above, one must step back and think about the implications that has towards ranking better. Some will counter that it's all about the traffic. But in light of the way most webmasters hide their link pages (not to mention the uselessness of the typical "links page") you would have to exchange links with thousands of websites before traffic becomes meaningful consideration.

Can we stop and think about this for a moment?
I'm not saying that reciprocal link exchanges are bad, or that people who exchange links are spammers. But I'm not saying that reciprocal link exchanges are encouraged by Google, either. What I am saying is that people should step back a moment and consider what they are doing. It's time to realistically consider what we assume to be true.

I may be wrong, but this is still worth a little thought: The practice of reciprocal link exchange seems to walk like a duck.

Quack.