Maile Ohye, of Google’s Webmaster Central team, delivered the keynote discussion this morning at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto. She gave a room full of webmasters, search engine practitioners and website owners the scoop… “right from the horses mouth”, as the moderator mentioned. Although horse is not a term that describes this vibrant Googler that has 5 years in the Googleplex. Ohye is based out of Maintain View California with the webmaster central team.

Ohye gave some insights into the recent algorithm changes at Google as well as some discussions about the new infrastructure that Google rolled out nicknamed caffeine. The update has repositioned many sites on the serp’s, some higher and some lower. If there was any one message to take away from this discussion it is that content is still key.

Google continues it efforts to deliver nothing but the most relevant documents to searchers. Ohye continuously referred to web sites pages as documents. She never once said great looking websites, she didn’t say the best designed websites – it is clear that the written word on the web is what is king. Using the term document, in my mind, really helps to separate the written word from the design. This again validates the eKzact emphasis on a balanced approach to design, writing and conversion objectives.

Inbound links to your website are still an important part of Googles several hundred triggers. Links should become a by-product of doing good business online. Build a unique and relevant website with excellent information and links will then come naturally. The role of mechanized link building was clearly frowned upon by this Googler. The point was that a few quality links are better than a high number of poor quality links.

Ohye clearly had a view on the use of landing pages to focus keyword attention to your niche product. Signs of exacerbation followed a question from the floor around landing pages followed by Ohye and the moderator reminiscing about similar discussions at earlier sessions. Google’s commitment to returning the most accurate search results and to improve user experience really does make, sometimes spammy over optimized, landing pages a contradiction to their goals. Ohye and the moderator had clearly anticipated this question.

There were a number of other excellent points made during this mornings SES keynote, most deserving their own future post.

Best regards,

David West
Calgary based SEO

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