Indian Google conference – Webmasters & Google interacts
(I wrote this on my way to Google, Banglore, could not post it that day. These were our expectations before the conference)
On my way for the first day of the conference at Google before heading to Chennai for search camp. In Google, we are expected to go through the webmaster center, mobile friendly websites and some of the other topics.
I will generally be looking for some of the topics on mobile friendly websites. Now going back to webmaster center of Google, I liked it for:
- Removing some of the URLs from the index. This helped some of the clients.
- Discovering the links (other sites linking to you), this motivates the team. Though they have started showing the nofollow links as well. So I have use my own application to analyse the links in detail.
- Canonicalization, (www or without www) was quite helpful for the clients using IIS servers, which sucks when it comes to redirection.
- (One secret) Geo targeting. Some of my clients are focused only in US and after changing the Geo target to US their websites disappeared from other parts of the world and became a little more prominent in US based search. (I am not sure whether it still works that way).
- Duplicate titles – Hmm, Somewhat useful
- Duplicate meta descriptions, this helps as having different meta descriptions can help in uniqueness of the page.
- Robots.txt analyzer – This also helps us verify it.
- Sitemap submission – Both the normal, video and mobile.
First India Search Masters in India (Google)
This is the first of its kind and I hope that it is just a beginning. You will be surprised to know that how many US sites are developed, handled and marketed by Indian Team (in India). I had opportunity to see top 2 websites for one of the highly searched financial keywords. One had an Indian team and other had outsourced to an Indian company with a budget of $20k per month.
I had an opportunity to look deeper into the strategies adopted by the Indian Team, it was just not enough. I am expecting that meetings like India Search Masters will provide more exposure to our Indian webmasters.
My expectations: Thinking Beyond Google
Though I am in Google but still wishing to think beyond Google. My sincere wish is that through these conferences many more should be inspired to look beyond Google (Search Engines in general). I expect that such exposures will help us understand that it is Google’s job to list the best sites to the top ranking and our job (as web marketing support) is to make the website (web business) good and better.
Looking forward for the first day!
Update: Expect a long mail about Google conference with common queries and the topics covered.