Camster - 6:21 am on Mar 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

Here are a few more comments from Daniel Dulitz from the crawler session at Search Engine Strategies in Boston. (See Brett's post for a full roster and photo. [webmasterworld.com...] ) The reps of all the crawlers always come to these sessions with a few canned comments and if asked questions or pressed beyond that, they retreat to cryptic comments or terse answers. So here are summaries of Daniel's comments:

1) custom error pages: Google wants you to deliver error pages as error pages (404s). If you are trying to deliver targeted content to the user when a page can't be found, he asked that it still be done with a 404.

2) as previously posted by GoogleGuy, hide session ids in URLs from Googlebot.

3) expired domains: Google will "soon" be filtering expired domains from its index and link calculations [no further elaboration]

4) when asked about the significance of ODP/dmoz listings to Google, Daniel replied that "links from directories that people still use" have significance to Google. [he did not expand on this. the question was about ODP specifically but he did not refer directly to ODP in his answer.]

5) an audience member suggested that webmasters would be willing to pay to find out whether a site had been banned, Daniel replied that Google would love to be able to respond to these kinds of inquiries and that they are "working very hard" to do so. "When we find a fair way to do it, we will."

6) use of applications that send automated queries (eg, WebPosition) is against their terms of service. Using it may result in them blocking your searching. It won't usually affect your rank.

7) he mentioned in passing that they crawl dynamic sites more slowly than static pages so that they don't overwhelm the databases behind them [for what that's worth]

As I said, his comments were crisp and carefully worded. He did not elaborate beyond what I have noted. I have done my best to capture the gist of these comments. If you heard something different or differently, add it here.

Have at it!