Notes from Google Searchmasters conference 2009 – Bangalore

As you all know, I had attended the Google SearchMasters event at their Bangalore office yesterday along with the 200-ish webmasters and SEOs from different parts of the country. and it was fun.

It wasn’t the “barcamp” or “unconference” style event, but an informative one which had Google written all over it. It was all about knowing the Google webmasters team, their tools available for webmasters, the options we webmasters and SEOs had to run our websites better, and the gestures from Google telling you that they were willing to listening to you.

The event saw talks on using the webmasters tools – good practices, Google Analytics, General good practices in SEO and Web Design, Practices in building the Mobile friendly websites and quite a lot of Q&A sessions.

Adam Lasnik was generous enough to address the crowd’s questions on SEO and he clarified quite a lot of Q’s and it was interesting to hear it from Google’s perspective, that was new.

Adam said that it was interesting to hear more questions on linking and duplicate content (and such advanced levels of SEO), from the Indian crowd.

Ankit Gupta did a pretty illustrative session on building “Mobile friendly websites” and all his points were clear. There were repetitive mentions on how simplicity can be a key while building mobile friendly websites and how the mobile platform can be the “next big thing” in the coming years. (I have  detailed article on this coming up later.)

Koti Ivaturi did enlighten the crowd about how webmasters can use the Google webmasters forum, the Moderator tool to ask questions with the community and the Google guys, and get them answered.

Rajat Mukherjee discussed about the importance and power of Google custom search, and how webmasters/bloggers can use the free tool to get their site better indexed and give users a better user experience.

Deepak Kumar had a great session discussing the power of Google Analytics and how webmasters can make use of it in tracking goals and enhancing user experiences in our sites.

There was a Q&A session at the end of the event for which there were the much coveted Google goodies, were gifted to guys who gave right answers. I managed to “grab” two And there was a lovely bunch of webmasters and bloggers who attended the event. it was a pleasure meeting Nishan, Amit, Vikas, Varun and the others.

Commendable effort by the Google Webmasters team, a great opportunity given for webmasters and SEO’s. Looking forward to see more from Google.