Either there are a lot more people here today or I was in the wrong sessions yesterday. I actually had to sit on the floor (cross legged) along with a packed group listening about Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues. Now I know what you are thinking “should have gotten there earlier and not 10 minutes into the presentations…” I was busy taking photos of all the participants checking out our very cool booth. If you are reading this every morning to stay up to date on all the happenings at SES 2007, and you are actually here stop by and check us out - booth 2014.

So what did I learn today you ask? It’s not how much I’ve learned, but the quality of the information I wasn’t aware of within the context of specific areas revolving around the search arena. Today I was lucky enough to attend sessions on Sitemaps & URL Submission, Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues, SEO Through Blogs & Feeds and Robots.txt (coincidentally, all in the same Sutton North conference room for those who know the Hilton’s layout by heart). Let me reference my note book for some key takeaways:

• Announcement that Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live (MSN) have all agreed to recognize SITEMAP in your robots.txt files.
• Yahoo’s Site Explorer is “officially” out of BETA. Also, regarding Site Explorer, you are allowed the ability to delete pages from Yahoo’s index (obviously pages you have control over, not just any page people), and according to the Yahoo representative recovery is “easy,” except for those pages you wish to recover where months have passed since deletion (then it’s harder, but apparently possible). As a side note, Google did mention in the Robots.txt session that within Webmaster Central you can do the same thing.
• The use of multiple sitemaps for separate categories such as news, video & mobile was offered as a recommendation.
• Don’t confuse spiders, use appropriate robots.txt and 301 redirects. The comment was made (and I’m paraphrasing here) “…spiders are like 4 year olds with short attention spans… oh look at this… hey, what’s that over there, lets go look…”
• Yet again I had the privilege to sit though another presentation by FeedBurner. Some duplicate content (sorry, couldn’t resist) but some great WordPress plugin suggestions. Look for reviews and links once I get back to the live world after testing.
• As a small footnote, did you know that the robots.txt was created in June 1994? The Ask representative tells me so.

All in all a great day full of very informative speakers and some excellent suggestions. I am looking very forward to tomorrow’s session on Wikipedia & SEO, and How To Teach A Horse Taps… ok, that’s not really a session. Check back tomorrow for continued post-download of SES 2007 and the sessions I was able to attend. As mentioned in yesterdays post, many of these summaries and observations will be blown out in greater detail once back in the home office, so stay tuned.

Do I have a quote once again to end this post? Of course I do. This time made by Danny Sullivan at the very beginning of the first session I attended today:

“All the search engines are merging as one. So going forward… one engine…”

Check back tomorrow.

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