7 facts from Igor Ashmanov's SEO-conference

The annual conference of Igor Ashmanov on search engine optimization and website promotion on the Internet was held in Moscow on November 15-16. I will not restore the chronology of events, but I will note the most important, interesting and new theses, voiced at the conference:

1. Google will not give up on PageRank. According to a Google representative, the company did not develop it for disconnection.
2. Yandex will not abandon the TCI, said Alexander Sadovsky . Moreover, Alexander promised that the TCI will be updated until the end of 2007 for sure. Suspicions about the closure of the TCI arose among Runet users due to the fact that updates were made less and less, even overtaking Google PageRank by this value.
3. Rambler (represented by Arkady Moreynis ) announced closed testing of a fundamentally new so-called “vertical search”. Arkady's report was surprisingly constructive. The essence of the "vertical search" in the division of all search results into blocks that can be expanded, preview, collapse. Arkady gave such an example that if we type in the search for Britney Spears, we’ll get a block with her biography, discography, a selection of photos, news related to her; Well, below we get a simple issue - just in case if none of the above listed suits us. In this case clustering by types of content (sports, news, medicine, science, politics, etc.) is assumed. Frankly, it is not entirely clear how these types of partitioning can work simultaneously. The additional fact that the search is undergoing internal testing, and access to it is almost unreal, suggests that the search hardly works now even remotely as the developers would like. It is also worth noting that Google and Nigma already have something very similar, although it works implicitly, i.e. not for all requests. The question is - do we even need this?
4. It is no secret that LiveInternet.ru is distributing its browser toolbar in order to read statistics by analogy with the American project Alexa . So, Vladimir Dolgov (Google-Russia) supported the doubts that the idea of ​​calculating statistics through toolbars is viable in Russia. And indeed, the Russian audience uses very little toolbars relative to the American. It seems to me that the reason for this lies in the absence of universal and, most importantly, high-quality fully Russian-language toolbars, as well as a person’s distrust of such programs.
5. Viktor Lavrenko, the head of Nigma, asked Ashmanov how they were going to conquer the audience in such a dense market, answered adequately: “We are not chasing visitors. We are chasing technology. ”
6. Dolgov issued a couple of interesting revelations regarding Russian Google. There is such a project: Google answers (requires authorization) . This is really the first project in the history of Google, which was not launched on the American site. It was launched by us. The most interesting thing is that it was not Russian programmers who developed it, but American ones. Russian Google only agreed to test it "on cats" (that is, on us, Russians). It can be seen, Google-USA understood that the project is very dubious prospects. The second secret is this: the relevant output of a search on the Internet by Google for a while (and maybe even now) was mixing up in the top ten results from this project, Google answers. It turned out that this secret was also a surprise for Dolgov himself. Frankly, Vladimir looked extremely incompetent for his position. There was a feeling that he did not even read corporate press releases.
7. The Internet audience of the Vietnamese is approaching the absolute number of Runet. And in China, the percentage of users is extremely low, and in general “Chinanet” is at the stage of development of the Internet of 2001, when there was little use of search engines, more and more bookmarks and directories. One of the reasons for the slow development is the high level of control over the Internet by the Chinese government. It is worth looking at this market.

And finally, about the conference itself. It was attended by more than 1,100 people, which puts it in the first place among all Russian web-based conferences. The conference itself was very interesting and exciting. In part, it took place on the sidelines, which made it possible in an informal setting to get acquainted with an incredible amount of interesting and necessary people (by the way, respond to the habrey, whom I now know personally :)). Unambiguous respect to Igor Ashmanov.