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Next up on the agenda: Lunch With The Google Engineers, which isn't as intimate and cozy as the name sounds (not with hundreds of people in the room).

Got my meal and then a pretty decent seat to listen to "Matt Cutts and Friends". Matt posted an email address for the conference that we shouldn't post online, so here it is:

Just kidding. Matt singled out Barry Schwartz as exactly the type of person who might do so. We'll see if he did.

Google's Vanessa Fox showed off Google Sitemaps, showing us the Sitemaps stats for Google itself. Turns out a good percentage of Google's pages are restricted by robots.txt, around 15-20%. Matt says that the three most difficult problems for a webmaster are htaccess, robots.txt, and Apache redirects.

Matt advises against stringing 301 permanent redirects in a row, sending the user (and thus the crawler) through page after page after page until their destination. Anything more than five might confuse Googlebot and make it give up on crawling your site.

While Matt was talking about BMW getting banned, Danny Sullivan brought up Google Blogoscoped on screen, with Philipp's post showing what the problem was. Nice plug for him, I'm sure.

Matt advises against using Google Sitemaps for premium content that is charged for, like when an academic site will show an excerpt and charge for showing the rest.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.