Google, Bing Reps Talk Best Practices

October 7, 2009 · Print this article, Visited 183 times, 1 so far today

Google and Bing employees know tons of useful stuff about search engines, and many people find their tips useful.  But let's admit: a lot of SEO experts have seen the same pieces of advice repeated at conference after conference for years, and so at SMX East, two speakers went a little bit off the beaten path into the subjects of speed and security.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Maile Ohye, who is a developer programs tech lead at Google, in fact started by talking about things site owners should disallow via robots.txt or no-index/no-follow tags.  Login pages and calendars are two examples she gave, and this idea extends to anything that lacks meaningful content that you would want to have indexed.

Ohye then got into some tips about improving page speed.  In order to reduce load time, she suggested ordering the CSS and external scripts on your pages efficiently.  Placing style sheets above external scripts allows for parallel loading, she noted, which is much faster than the alternative.

Next, Sasi Parthasarathy, a program manager at Bing, swung things in a different direction by stating, "Security is the biggest problem plaguing the Web right now."  Spammers and malware providers are always looking for sites to hack in order to get link popularity, and he said that if you if you fail to take security seriously, you may lose credibility among both users and search engines.

So stick to good practices like creating strong passwords and keeping your software up to date.  Parthasarathy suggested using anti-malware tools to look for security vulnerabilities, as well.

Finally, try to ensure that config files are not too accessible, and carefully monitor forums and blogs.

To your success!