Finally, I've made it to the conference here in San Jose. I got off the airplane at 2:00pm and by 3:00pm was in the speaker ready room in a roundtable discussion about search spam and rankings with Matt Cutts from Google, Dave Naylor (DaveN), Todd Friesen (Oilman), Greg Boser (Webguerilla) and Elisabeth Osmeloski from SEW. Needless to say it was loads of fun, watching Dave point out his competitors' spamming techniques to Matt (who deleted them from the GG index on the spot via some sort of control panel I've never seen before).

Afterwards, I attended the Indexing Summit II, run by Danny Sullivan, where I was chided for attempting to ask too many questions. Sorry Danny! I'm just excited because it's my first session here.

In the end, it appeared that two main issues were discussed, if not resolved - the first, that search engines should always recognize the "target" domain as the canonical one in a 301 re-direct situation. Barry will surely have more detailed notes on this (oh look, here it is). The second, which was less resolved, was that titles and descriptions in the SERPs will continue to come from wherever the heck the search engines please and they're totally uninterested in those of us who are concerned that ODP data or scraped content would be more important than our existing titles and descriptions. The exception is Yahoo!, which promised to switch away from using the Yahoo! Directory listings soon.

After the session, I went back to my room to get ready for the Google dance. I ran into Matt (Cutts of Google) and Rahul (Lahiri of Ask Jeeves) and walked with them to the parking garage, while listening to them berate Yahoo! for claiming to have a new index size of 20 billion. We all surmised that the web probably doesn't contain 20 billion "unique" documents, and that Yahoo! is probably using some "funny" techniques to arrive at that number. I also thanked Rahul for his contributions to Cre8asite forums recently.

Next, I met up with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR, who was gracious and very friendly. We talked a bit about spammers, which is probably the most entertaining and oft-dicussed topic here at the San Jose SES show. I rode with him and some friends from Atlanta down to the Google party, and incidentally, ended up talking to Dennis Mortensen, an exceptionally friendly Danish man from IndexTools - a web analytics firm. Although I haven't checked them out yet, according to Greg and his friends, they are absolutely the best in the business. I'll review tomorrow for sure, but would be glad to get off Web CEO, which is expensive and doesn't track as well as one might like.

The Google party itself was enjoyable, lots of free food, although the beer and wine was of particularly low quality - Kendall Jackson and Budweiser dominated, so I stuck with Coke and water. The hors'doeuvres and free ice cream, along with DJs, a live jazz band and some video games were entertaining, but the real actin was down a short hallway inside, where folks could "meet the engineers". I spent most of my night in here listening and asking questions to several different engineers from search spam removal and AdSense/AdWords. The search spam engineer DaveN and I spoke with wouldn't tell me what Google called the "sandbox" internally, but agreed that he'd just try to call it sandbox from now on (and convince the rest of the engineering team, too), so we could all be on the same page. He also was vehement that not all new sites are shot into it - you have to trip a filter (albeit a strict one) to get "boxed".

I also heard a ton from DaveN about how he "chases the algorithm" by monitoring huge patterns in thousands of SERPs. He's got an ISP that he runs, so scraping is possible from literally hundreds of thousands of IP addresses randomly all day every day. To Google, there's no way to tell it's not real searchers who are using the ISPs, so Dave's got a pretty sweet set up. I also ran into friends like Jill Whalen, Mikkel DeMib Svensen, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and tons more.

I didn't hang around the bars after the party, though. I feel tanked tonight and although I'm glad to be here, I'm not much in the mood for drinking. More updates tomorrow, however, as well as my speech at Site ECG. I'll try to post a live link to the slides after the session's over so folks can check it out.