GoogleGuy - 7:52 am on Jun 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

Many thanks, vitaplease and Woz and the other mods who keep things running so well here. I've got to run a meeting early tomorrow morning, so let me just start by noting a few things. I'll start by repeating the message #567 from thread 3. reseller was asking for a little bit of an indexing outlook for the next few day and how much flux to expect. I said:

reseller, currently, a few data centers have some different data that should be everywhere in a few days. I'll keep people posted on the status of things, and collect feedback closer to the end after things are settling down more. I'd expect that things will be back to their normal level of everflux by New Orleans. But we do have incremental indexing after all, so it's normal to expect a certain amount of change to the index every day or so (aka everflux). In fact, everflux is a pretty good analogy. If you go back to summer 2003, update Fritz was the beginning of the transition from a monthly update to an incremental index. It caused a lot of comments, because plenty of people were happy with an index that only changed once a month. A lot of the thickness in my hide started with Fritz during summer two years ago. happy! Summer in the northern hemisphere is often a good time for a search engines to work on revamping different parts of our system and improving our quality; typically search engine traffic is lower in the summer due to seasonality. So the summer is a good time to think about things like bringing in new signals of quality and ways to rank pages, plus doing things like reorganizing our webmaster pages, etc. etc.

It's true that the summer (northern hemisphere) is when traffic is lower and sometimes it's easier to roll new things into crawling/indexing/scoring. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we worked on revamping our webmaster pages, for example. The SEO and quality guidelines pages have aged pretty well, but other parts of the webmaster section need to be reorganized; there's a few places where there's the same info (e.g. about robots.txt) repeated in several places or scattered over different pages. It's not trivial to reorganize that much info, esp. since it's translated into so many languages. But better to go ahead and start, and then if we want to tune those pages later, that's okay. I've been aching for a long time to mention somewhere official that sites shouldn't use "&id=" as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use "&id=" with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter, but we've only mentioned that here and on a few other places. Getting started on things like that will be nice. I appreciate the people who sat down and tried to tease out the info on our current webmaster pages and organize it more logically.