Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York continued with “Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices Edition.” Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land moderated, and notes from the presentations and Q&A with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing include:

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.

• If you need to bring your site offline for temporary maintenance, what’s the best way to do it? Return a 503 with a helpful message. Google will later recrawl the URL. Google will not index the content of the 503 (the preexisting content will be available in search results).
• How do you help bots crawl your site more efficiently with if-modified-since? Respond when appropriate with 304 “Not modified.”
• Which file(s) might be good to disallow from crawlers? individual login pages and calendars
• What action(s) can reduce load time (and thus increase user happiness)? order the external scripts and CSS on your pages efficiently (external scripts load serially – all other loading is blocked -  **stylesheets above external scripts allow parallel loading – much faster)** compress images
• What is the possible result of this implementation of “other-language” versions of a page using rel=”canonical”? This can be a problem if a french searcher is searching for a site. She’ll still see english version.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft

• Secure Your Website – no one talks about it. Everyone takes it for granted.
• Spammers target spiky queries that follow popular events and capitalize on the popularity to make money. They hack popular sites, use the link, and then spam the queries that target those queries.
• Blogs and forums are user-generated content, which makes them nonsecure and vulnerable if not secured/monitored regularly.
• Links on hacked pages may lead to a fake malware page which actually loads viruses if you click for the antivirus.
• Forums and blogs are spam magnets.

Q&A with Maile, Sasi, and Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Inc.

• Using javascript to fool the search engines is a recipe for disaster.
• Safest to use text links.
• In bing, linking out is NOT part of the algorithm.
• Google and bing never supported the keywords tag. Yahoo, within last 3 months, doesn’t support keywords tag. They were NEVER a major ranking factor of the search engines.
• Good ranking factors: GOOD TEXT, informative and unique, content should make sense. KEYWORDS in the title tag, in the page itself (body copy), (in past – higher on the page was helpful), presence of the words in the links or near the links that lead to your page.
• How to move a website to a new domain without affecting its rankings: webmaster central blog – best practices for moving your site, webmaster tools – change of address; 301s
• Javascript & ability to executive has been a long time coming and they are treading lightly to ensure no negative side effects. only certain types of events are found to be safe.
• Canonical tag transferrs all link properties — it’s true.
• Whatever the 301 will do for you, the canonical will do for you.
• If you change hosting, it doesn’t matter – it won’t affect your rankings unless your hoster is slow. It doesn’t matter what your backend is if your structure is the same.
• Display none by itself isn’t blackhat, but it’s walking a thin line.
• Anytime that money is changing hands, you’re safest using nofollow.

I think it’s great that reps from the big-3 search engines took the time to come answer questions from Internet marketers. It makes it easier to play by the rules when you get additional opportunity to learn what the rules are!

– Stacey Morgan Smith

• The deal is still a long way from closing, in fact the complete bing/Yahoo! search engine is at least two years away. The process of approval alone will likely take the rest of 2009.
• Microsoft’s adCenter platform will replace Yahoo!’s Panama platform. This means that ads placed in Yahoo! will be managed through MSN adCenter’s interface. This will take additional transition time after the deal is approved by regulators.
• Cost Per Click (CPC) prices will be set by adCenter’s automated auction process. With an increase in advertisers coming to bing from Yahoo!, it will be interesting to see what happens with CPCs. Like anything in the PPC medium, industry verticals will obviously play a large role.

One of the primary shortcomings of Microsoft’s adCenter was lack of volume. It simply does not generate as much traffic as Google or Yahoo! This is one of the most intriguing parts to this partnership. In the words of a press release from www.choicevalueinnovation.com:

“With the addition of Yahoo!’s search volume, Microsoft will achieve the size and scale required to unleash competition and innovation in the market, for consumers as well as advertisers.”

Overall, the general consensus among the PPC community is that this partnership is a good thing for the PPC industry. It will give Google increased competition and also will give Microsoft the search volume it needs to accelerate the learning from its own marketplace and improve its adCenter platform more quickly. I’m looking forward to any improvements Microsoft can make to its adCenter management interface. At the moment, AdWords provides the most advanced campaign management tools, so it will be interesting to see what improvements Microsoft can make with the increased search volume and insight from Yahoo!.

Sources: ad Age, Choice. Value. Innovation., and SEW

You may have read this week that Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. will create a new partnership. If you’re like many of our customers, you’re probably wondering how that will affect your Search Engine Optimization.

The two companies seem to be working together to step up their efforts toward challenging the big player in the game: Google. This isn’t the first time they have discussed working together (in one form or another). Microsoft Corp. attempted to purchase Yahoo in the past. Google even previously expressed interest in working with Yahoo, but it fell through, partially due to antitrust concerns.

As for search, Yahoo!, which was never REALLY a search engine (Yahoo! is technically a directory), will begin to provide search results powered by bing, Microsoft’s new search engine (though they call it a decision engine).

This “union” will significantly increase the number of searches conducted through bing. In June, Google had a 65% share of total US Searches. Yahoo! and bing followed at 20.1 and 8%, respectively. After bing begins providing Yahoo!’s search, bing’s market share could be around 28%.

So how will this affect SEO?

Your rankings will most likely change. If you’re 10th in bing, you’ll probably also be 10th in Yahoo!

Your number of site visitors will also likely change. Being on the first page helps, whether you’re reaching 8% or 28% of searchers, but if you were on page 1 with Yahoo and you’re on page 3 with bing, customers will have a harder time finding you.

You only need to worry about two different engines’ search algorithms instead of three. Each engine values optimization elements differently: titles, links, content, anchor text.

Should you change your SEO plan?

The basics of your SEO efforts shouldn’t change because your goal is still the same – reach your target audience and give them what they need.

How do you do that? The same way you always have:

• have quality, relevant content on your site that answers your audience’s questions;
• follow best practices in site structure, hosting, etc.,
• gain smart links that make it easier to find you.

Following SEO basics will ensure steady site improvement, whether you’re dealing with two search engines or twenty.

sources: AdAge, Yahoo! Finance, and comScore

– Stacey Morgan Smith