SES San Jose “Meet the Crawlers” Session

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
Though poorly attended the SES San Jose “Meet the Crawlers” section offered some give and take with key search engineers from MSN, Google, Yahoo, and ASK. All engines seemed to “agree” on these points:

Avoid paid linking
Use 301 redirection for site moves.  Generally this will pass authority (though IMHO you should avoid 301 moves if possible due to losing rank).

Make sure robots.txt file is in order and is allowing all bots  you want “in”.
In another session it was said that ASK downranks sites without a robots.txt.

L to R in picture: MSN’s Eytan Seidman, Yahoo’s Sean Sucher, Google’s Evan —, and Ask’s Peter? Lindsey (I’ll correct these names later with my notes)