Come out to SMX Advanced in Seattle and party with Webmaster Central

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Our team at Webmaster Central is always looking
for ways to communicate with you, the webmaster community. We do through providing
tools that tell you
more about your site and let you give us input about your site, talking to you in our
discussion forums,
reading what you have to say across the blogs and forums on the web, blogging here, and by
talking to you in person at conferences. We can’t talk to as many of you in person as we can reach
through other means, such as this blog, but we find meeting face-to-face to be invaluable.

So, we’re very excited about an upcoming conference in our hometown, Seattle—
SMX Advanced,
June 4-5. Since it’s nearby, many from our team can attend and we’re hoping to hear more about
what you like and what you’d like to see us do in the coming year. We’re participating in two
summits at this conference. Summits are a great way to find out exactly what issues you’re facing
and explore ways we can solve them together. We can weigh the alternatives and make sure we
understand the obstacles from your perspective. The recent
robots.txt summit
was a great opportunity for all the search engines to get together and brainstorm with you, the
webmaster. We came away from that with lots of great ideas and a better understanding of what
you’re looking for most with the evolution of robots.txt. We hope to do the same with the two
summits at SMX Advanced.

At the
Duplicate Content Summit,
I’d love to talk to you about the types of situations you’re facing with your site. Are you most
concerned about syndicating your content? Using dynamic URLs with changing parameters? Providing
content for sites in multiple countries? For each issue, we’ll talk about ways we can tackle
them. What solutions can we offer that will work best for you? I’m very excited about what we can
accomplish at this summit, although I’m not quite as excited about the 9am start time.
Fortunately, our party isn’t the night before.

At the
Penalty Box Summit,
Matt Cutts will be on hand to talk to you about all the latest with our guidelines and
reinclusion procedures. And he’ll want to hear from you. What concerns do you have about the
guidelines? How can we better communicate violations to you? Unfortunately, our party is the
night before this session, but I’m sure there will be lots of coffee on hand.

And speaking of the party… since conference attendees are coming all the way to Seattle, we
thought we should throw one. The Google
Seattle/Kirkland office
and the Webmaster Central team are hosting
SMX After Dark: Google Dance NW
on Monday night. We want to say thanks to you for this great partnership, as well as give you the
chance to learn more about what we’ve been up to. We’ll have food, drinks, games (Pacman and
Dance Dance Revolution anyone?), and music. Talk to the Webmaster Central engineers, as well as
engineers from our other Kirkland/Seattle product teams, such as
Talk,
Video, and
Maps. We may even have a dunk tank!
Who would you most like to try your hand at dunking?