SEO Tips from the Pros

The final session before the hot seat, I was pretty tired but still looking forward to hearing from these experts.

Derrick Wheeler talked about the MSCOM Beast, Microsoft.com and the problems they've run into managing such a large number of websites. They have over 1.2 billion URLs, and very large percentage are duplicate pages. One interesting thing he said is that they don't even trust Live Search to bring back the best results. A tool he recommended using to analyze keywords belonging to a page was tagcrowd.com. Speaking about the necessary communication among people in a search-related project, Derrick had a great quote:

Sometimes implementation costs more than the recommendations you make.

Next up was Marshall Simmonds from the NYT. He spoke about search and how to go about it in a 150+ year old company with millions of articles. I remember when you had to be registered with the NYT to view any of their articles. Marshall was one of the people responsible for pushing back the registration wall and opening up more content. Also, during Q&A, someone asked what statistic was used to tell if a page was considered a duplicate of another page. Marshall had a definitive answer that even the other panelists had not heard: 95%. A page is considered a duplicate if 95% or more of the content is the same. Good to know!

Laura Lippay from Yahoo!