ABAKUS

Charles Martin from Google
- He is using a Apple Computer, kudos to him
- First time at SES, he works in the search quality group (I guess under Matt)
- Links are a proxy for human judgement
- PageRank slide.... "Most visible factor of the ranking algorithm"
- Be the user when building links
- "Click here" links doesnt help much, use rich anchor text
- Encourage related sites to link to use, use unique relevant content to attract links
- Avoid; recip links, poor quality link exchanges, fishy looking sites, who you link to can affect your reputation.
- He specifically says "You can be held accountable for linking to people"
- No hidden or cloaked links
- He said avoid & % etc, "We wont look at them" (hmmm)
- Do not obsesses with back links
- Design site with user in mind
- He then shows off a bit of Google Sitemaps and its error tracking