At the end fo February, representatives from all four of the major search engines - Ask, Yahoo!, MSN & Google - will be attending a conference on the topic of search engine indexing. A fantastic indexing thread, started by the conference organizer, Danny Sullivan, has brought up some of the most contentious issues facing webmasters and search engines.
A list of the items that have been discussed so far on the thread include:
- The formation of a standards organization, as mentioned by Xan at his blog and many other parties over the last 6 months.
- Referrer IDs in query strings
- Ratification and standardization of commands like the MSN robots.txt crawl-delay
- Mike Grehan's complaints about Filthy Linking rich
- The handling of 302 re-directs, also known in our community as "page-hijacking"
- Methods for making search more temporally aligned with content (letting new content flourish, rather than wither)
This is a very important time in the search engine optimization world. It could set the tone for the next few years' relationships between the SEs and SEOs/SEMs. I personally have a lot of faith that things can move forward smoothly and that we can find a way to grow this industry successfully together.
I'm curious to know how often summits such as this where all the major search engines come together and discuss standardization of certain protocol occurs. Anyone care to shed some light on this? Was this just a rare incident?