Last month I had a chance to talk to Aaron D’Souza from Google at the Search Engine Room conference. Aaron is a Software Engineer in the Search Quality group run by Matt Cutts. I asked Aaron about the new Google webmaster guideline:

• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

In particular I asked how Google determines whether pages “add much value for users”. Aaron’s response was that if the pages are ranking in Google then they are deemed to add value for users. I was pleased to hear this.

I described how we were concerned about a customer of ours that had over a hundred thousand search and navigation pages indexed by google even though they had less than 5000 products. We were concerned that Google may penalise them. Aaron reassured me that this was fine and suggested we use the sitemaps feature to indicate to Google which of those pages we considered the most important.

Martin Kelly just sent me the photo which prompted me to write this. He also sent this one of me giving a presentation.

We are involved in a couple of events over the next week. This involves a little travel for the ever charming Ed Hoffman. He is speaking at the Product Attribute Summit in Orlando on Friday. This is run by Channel Intelligence. Then next week he’ll be at the Internet World conference in the UK, where we’ll be exhibiting.

I saw Jacob Nielsen discussing the importance of breadcrumb trails and how they should be implemented.

We use the breadcrumb trail in our search and navigation solutions. It reflects the search that was done and any restrictions or facets that the user had selected. In the example below I searched for My Chemical Romance on Hot Topic, then selected Apparel then Band T-Shirts. You can see the bread crumb trail at the top reflects those selections.

We follow most of the guidelines that Jacob recommended. Because the facets don’t have any natural hierarchy we show them in the order in which they are selected. On the few times we have tried showing them in any other order we have always had complaints.

We put together some interesting stats from across a handful of our clients on misspellings on internal search. We used a broad definition of a misspelling. If a search phrase contained a word which is not on the site then we count it as a misspelling. Obviously this will also include words that are spelled (or spelt?) correctly but just aren’t on the site. For example if you search for “razor” on Tupperware.com it’s not on the site anywhere so we would count that as a misspelling even though razor is spelled correctly. So this yields an upper limit.

The average was 10% of queries contained a word that wasn’t in the index. This was higher than I was expecting and emphasises the importance of having a spell checker on your site search and of paying attention to your search terms that have poor results (which is a larger set than the terms which contain words that aren’t in the index). Interestingly the client with the lowest rate of misspellings is one that pays a lot of attention to our report that shows search terms with poor results and regularly updates their synonyms to try and improve these.

Just a quick note to say we will be exhibiting at the SES show in New York next week. If you’re in town then come by and see us at our booth. This is the first time for quite a few years that I won’t be at this show - because of family commitments. However Ed, David, Kim and Todd from SLI will be there.

As usual we’ll be giving away a shiny brass telescope so be sure to drop by booth 1122, put your card in the draw and we would love to show you what we can do.

I was listening to a practical ecommerce podcast yesterday where Mitch Bettis interviewed Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa asking for marketing tips for eCommerce sties. It’s a good interview The thing that caught my attention is Anne said that their research showed that the single most important page on your site is the site search page.

Anne said there are many things you can do that will have an impact on your ecommerce business - but you should focus first on those that have the biggest impact. Site Search is one of those. She also said co-registration was a very, very effective tactic for building out email lists.