Google searchmasters conference for indian webmasters
Google.com recently had organized the SearchMasters Conference targeted towards webmasters. As expected, the list of speakers had included some of the well known names in the industry. The group of audience also deserves a mention here. It included top brass in the Indian blogosphere, seo experts from across the country, members from the press and engineers like myself.
The event started off with a brilliant talk from Adam Lasnik. His photography skills deserve a special mention. I really loved the picture of lemur. Adam Lasnik had himself been webmaster helping out some fortune 500 companies in the past. With such a vast experience in the field, he was one of those with answers to any question, ofcourse related to seo 
. This engaging session was pretty much like a warm-up, touching upon the seo best practices. It was rehash of what has already been put up in their recent seo starter guide.
From a brilliant start, the conference then drifted onto other simple aspects of seo. The problem was that the conference then never caught on and remained to be an introductory talk on various google products for webmasters. Just before the lunch was the much awaited “site clinic” session in which a couple of sites were reviewed on the spot by Adam Lasnik and his team. The sites inspected were “redbus.in” and “www.tarladalal.com”. redbus.in is quite well built site with very less to complain about. On the other hand, tarladalal.com was built by kitchen experts. It was primarily a web1.0 site on the migration path, mentioned the owner of this site. This site had lots of problems and on that very day it happened to be a victim of some nasty hacking with links to viagra selling sites.
Post lunch, the conference pretty much became tutorial sessions. Google custom search is conceptually a good product with great APIs built around it. As such, there is not much to say about the product. Rajat Mukherjee of custom search team was a very good presenter. But unfortunately Google custom search is not a product that one can talk about for an hour. Some of the capabilities of google custom search are abilities to choose a subset of web, to override results for certain keywords, to tag results with label. They are quite useful but true excitement lies in innovative usage of their APIs.
This was followed by a subdued session of tutorial on building mobile applications. The talker was a graduate from IIT Delhi and perhaps the guy leading the team that build Orkut’s mobile version. But he needs to learn a great deal of things on how to be a good speaker. It was an extremely boring session with most of the audience compensating for the loss of sleep due to early flight that morning. The essence of the talk is that building a mobile application needs a lot of care and knowledge as it is drastically different from building a web application. At a time, when mobile penetration is extremely good in a huge country like India, innovative mobile applications would be an easy winner for entrepreneurs.
The last session was about google analytics and google site optimizer, presented by Deepak Kumar. This again turned to be a showcase of google analytics. No great wisdom or knowledge about analytics was offered to the audience. Instead the presenter displayed us all screenshots of various simple reports. When the time was to move on to Advanced Segments, Custom reporting and other Enterprise Features like Motion Charts, the presenter was quite convinced that most of the audience had no clues about them. Surprisingly for me, that turned out to be true. Of course, google has the data on how many users create custom reports or motion charts. Now I know why there are so many SEO firms out there in the market. Basically, no one has the idea or knowledge to find those reports that reveal the true performance of their sites. My self-opinionated thoughts apart, let me just reiterate one point. Motion charts allow you to visualize your data in five dimensions which really means a lot and helps in decision making much easier and faster. For a good hang of site optimizer, there are merely two options. The first option is to learn statistics and combinatorics to do things all by yourself. The second option is to use google website optimizer effectively and let all the nasty work be done by google for you. Of course, a true genius can verify google’s results.
Most of the QA were very site specific and that was quite irritating. Even the google team members were quite uncomfortable as they had to walk a thin rope in that, they don’t accidentally slip off some of their key parameters that would help rank sites.
For the fun part, here is my suggestion for all those seeking wisdom on seo. Google has an army of guys in search quality team. Date them and get them drunk. Then you can possibly get some useful information from them. And do remember, if their boss finds it out, you will have had it. He was formerly a fighter pilot 
so keep in mind that the punishment will be extremely severe. Of course, I am sure you wont mix up business with personal affairs.
So here it is, the event was marketing and showcasing of google products. Happier advertisers means happier google. That was why I got the invitation in the first place. Keeping in mind all the best practices, focus mainly on the customers. If you game the system today, you will potentially jeopardise your tomorrow. And to hell with all those seo firms, use them only if you find them cheaper and better than your in house experts.
