Action Items for the Engines from the SMX Conference

It feels cruel to give the search engineers at Yahoo!, Google, MSN & Ask more work, but I know that sometimes they might not have the best project tracking or distribution software, so I figured I'd be kind and make a list of items that need attention here in the blog, and they can refer to my post when they're wondering what to do with all their free time.

The following are requests made to engineers during SMX Seattle a couple weeks back that I personally felt were excellent suggestions.

• Parameter-Decapitator Instructions
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  I'm not sure that's the technical name, but this is certainly one of the items that the entire webmaster community direly needs. The concept is simple - provide a method in robots.txt to clarify that specific, parameter-type additions to a URL will be ignored by the engines. Thus, if Yahoo! was crawling along and saw the following URLs:
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   - seomoz.org/blog/entry-1
   - seomoz.org/blog/entry-1?referrer=marketingpilgrim.com
   - seomoz.org/blog/entry-1?referrer=marketingpilgrim.com&ID=44556
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  The engines could look at a robots.txt line indicating something like "ignoreparam = ID+referrer" and realize that the content at all four of the above URLs should be treated as the singular URL "seomoz.org/blog/entry-1" - they wouldn't index multiple versions and wouldn't encounter duplicate content problems from that indexing. It's really the best idea since sitemaps, and it's a long time coming.
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• Commercial API for Organic Data Requests
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  This one's desperately needed by anyone who runs tools that request data from the engines (ahem). Yahoo! Search Marketing has a commercial API, so do many of the services at Google and Amazon's Alexa data. However, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Microsoft Live.com, Ask.com & Google web search all need to add this feature. It should mean a few million more in revenue for each over the next couple years, and it gives legitimate marketers a way to grab data that's accurate and accounted for, without skewing number of searches or ad impressions, etc.
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• Webmaster Central for Yahoo!, MSN & Ask
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  Vanessa set the bar really, really high, so this is a tall order to fill, but I guarantee it's had positive returns for Google, not just in branding, but in financials, too. Personally, I'd nominate Laura Lippay to run the one at Yahoo!, and Rahul Lahiri would make a great webmaster interface head over at Ask. For Microsoft... Maybe Ken Headrick (granted, he's in Canada, but one stereotype that definitely sticks is the friendliness).
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• Hyperlink Next to "Results" to Explain the Estimates
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  In my interview with Matt, I went off a bit on all the reporters who use Google's search count numbers as research in a story. We came to the conclusion that one good solution might be to place a "?" next to the results where visitors could hover and see a little box explaining the "roughness" of the measurement.
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• Make it Easy to Sign Out of Google Personalized Results (without logging out)
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  You can use Joost's tool, but honestly, shouldn't it be more obvious that you're in personalized when they show them and easier to remove that feature without appending stuff to the URL? No one outside the search world is going to even know how to start with that.
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• MSN - Bring Back the Link Command
  
  It's been gone a while, and using the suggestion for a commercial API, you could actually make money off of it. The data's useful, it's available to you, go for it! Oh yeah - Eytan... You owe me a little sometin' sometin' :)

That's it for now. If you've got other requests, big or small, feel free to add them below.

FYI - This week finds me in Washington DC, helping the good folks at NPR with their SEO. Wish me luck! I've got 20+ hours of meetings and training over the next 3 days and around 400 slides to show (talk about death by PowerPoint). Hence, email (and posting, unless it's at 2:00am) will be very, very slow.