Google's Matt Cutts enlightened the audience with an incredible presentation at O'Reilly's web conference. Matt Cutts is widely acclaimed as a titan in the realm of Search Engine Soldiers. He has knocked out more search engine spam sites than any one has even heard of. The 'Spam Killer' spoke about some critical issues regarding Spam. Some of the main points of focus were:

1. How Google detects Spam.
2. The kinds of technology and systems that are designed to defend against Spam.

It is considered to one of the most dreaded penalties that can be levied by Google on a Webmaster for bad link practices. Known as -60 Penalty, it pushes the website of the penalized Webmaster 60 positions back in the search pages. This penalty is enforced mainly in the case of Paid Links, as they are considered to a be questionable tactic to gather links.

Many Webmasters on several occasions try to move their website to a new domain. However, the prospect of a 404 error (File not found) negatively impacting their site rankings restrains most of the Webmasters to perform the transition. Yet again, Google to the rescue. Google has provided some tips on the Webmaster Central Blog for the site owners to follow while moving their website to a new domain.

Members at Webmaster World discusses about the problem of server header status codes. It is one of those topics that aren't touched often!

According to the Webmasters World thread, almost every server can return an incorrect HTTP status in the server header. But, Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Service) has a particularly long history of such errors been shown. For example:

Tried to set up a "custom 404" page, so your users get a friendly human like message.

Google today came out with tips and suggestions on Webmaster Central Blog as to how Webmasters can make their websites more accessible and crawlable so as to achieve higher PageRanks in the Accessible Search as well as in the Google Search.

According to T.V Raman, research scientist at Google, "Critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot." Some of the few tips given by Mr. Raman:

On Friday, April11 2008 Google Webmasters Blog revealed that Google had been testing a new search related technology that would enable Google crawl agents to explore some HTML forms in an attempt to discover new web pages and URLs which have not yet been found and indexed.

It seems the world we live in has recently been relocated to the 'Twilight Zone'. The reason being, that recently a man named Jason Gambert is trying to register 'SEO' as a trademark. The most shocking point in this bizarre event is that he has managed to get all the way to the publication stage of the registration process.

According to Webmaster World, if you go by Google's words, then your competing websites can not harm your website rankings in any manner. But it is a harsh reality that these days many Webmasters deploy dirty trade tricks to defame a competitive website. This is also known as 'Google Bowling'. These methods severely damage your website's rankings as well as it's credibility. Some of the most common deceitful tactics employed these days are:

This day has just become a 'legal rodeo' for the Internet with a U.S. Court ruling, that the use of Trademarked terms in Meta Tags can create confusion and therefore can be considered as trademark infringement.

According to Eric Goldman, an 11th circuit, U.S Appeals Court has upheld a verdict delivered by the district court concluding that in the case of North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, the defendant (Axiom Worldwide) was guilty of copyright infringement. Axiom had used NAM's trademarks 'Accu-Spina' and “IDD Therapy” as their keywords for the meta tags.

Google's page ranking methods have been the mythical legend of SEO and page rankings. Finally the secret behind Google's methods of ranking a page in its SERP has come out. In March 2008, Google Quality Rater’s handbook was leaked online. According to Pandia, this handbook is the Holy Bible on which Google judges the quality and relevancy of a web page. Some of the factors are:

Query Types: