Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Our team atWebmaster Central is always looking for ways to communicate with you, the webmaster community. We do through providingtools that tell you more about your site and let you give us input about your site, talking to you in ourdiscussion 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 recentrobots.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 theDuplicate 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 thePenalty 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 GoogleSeattle/Kirkland office and the Webmaster Central team are hostingSMX 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 asTalk,Video, andMaps. We may even have a dunk tank! Who would you most like to try your hand at dunking?