(I’m traveling, but lots of good stuff from the recent SMX West search conference is now live — plus some new stuff — so I wanted to talk about it.)

At the SMX West search conference I did an Ignite talk about Google’s SEO audit that it did on itself. This was part of a global week of Ignite talks. An Ignite talk has 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of five minutes…

(I’m in the middle of traveling, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in the news that Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings. I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.)

The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc…

Sometime in the next few weeks, my wife and I are going to take a trip to Japan and Thailand. Our tenth wedding anniversary flew by in January 2010, and now we’re taking the chance to celebrate and explore some new places.

I’m really excited because I’ve never been to Asia before (!). We’ve got our trip mostly planned out, but I wanted to ask for suggestions on things to do, places to eat, or cool things that aren’t in the tour books…

I played with an iPad yesterday. Here’s my mini-review. The screen is bright and the touch sensitivity is fantastic. Given that it reminds me the most of an iPhone, it’s surprisingly heavy. It feels dense with potential.

On the childlike-sense-of-wonder-scale (as fake Steve Jobs would say), the iPad is better than the Macbook Air but not as stunning as the iPhone when the iPhone first came out…

I just wrapped up two 30 day challenges (no sugar for 30 days and no iPhone for 30 days). I’ll try to report back what I learned soon, but in the mean time I wanted to alert you that today I’m starting a new 30-day challenge: not replying to outside email.

When I announced my first 30 day challenge and did a poll on what challenge to do next, “no email” was near the bottom of the list…

Here’s some more stuff you should know about.

- I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth.

- Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal (Added: the address if you want to send a Paypal donation is rhea_drysdale [at] yahoo [dot] com)…

Google is replacing SearchWiki with stars in Google search. The stars sync with Google Bookmarks, so you can get access to them wherever you go. Once you star something, it shows up above the search results:

Pretty cool. But I discovered an extra little tip. If you go to Google Bookmarks, you can find a bookmarklet that will let you bookmark random pages as you surf. Then you can edit the bookmarks — for example, I added the words “Chrome market share” to three different metrics companies that I check each month:

The cool thing is that if your search matches the text that you added, that bookmark will show up in your search results:

This can be really handy…

[Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion. I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.]

Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google’s Arrogant Leaders. The two assertions that used my comments as material were “Google’s wealth means Google ‘gets it’” and “Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow…

In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s

The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.

To do it on an embedded video, use the “start” parameter…

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info. Go to

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

and tell us about the site that appears to be employing link spam…

This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners.

We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to all 150+ videos (over 11 hours of information). That’s important because for movies with captions, you can translate the captions into different languages…

Hey everybody, I just wanted to wish you a Happy Diwali! I hope that everyone has a wonderful festival of lights. It’s a good time today for introspection and reflection on the past year, and for hope for the year to come. Whether you celebrate with firecrackers, sweets, or appreciation for what you hold to be good and true–I hope you have a wonderful Diwali!

…

We made a video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. You can watch it if you want:

This answers a couple questions such as:
- Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?
- How do I make that url disappear from Google?

I hope the video helps if you have questions.

…

Googler Douwe Osinga has a great personal project that demonstrates the Google Chart API. Just by clicking a few boxes, you can make an image to show the countries (or states in the USA) that you’ve been to. Here’s where I’ve been in the United States:

Clearly I need to do a trip across the northern part of the country. If you run a website, the Google Chart API is a great/free way to add pretty charts to your website or dashboard easily…

I was glad to see that the FTC unanimously approved new guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials. The updated guidelines affirm the principle that material connections behind endorsements should be disclosed. This seems like a great time to offer my own disclosure information.

I am currently an employee of Google. I receive a salary from them and I also own Google stock and options…

A few weeks ago we had a visitor at the Googleplex: Rob Hof, the Silicon Valley bureau chief at BusinessWeek. Rob talked to a bunch of Googlers and sat in on one of our weekly quality-leads meetings. The resulting story is out now. The first part of the story covers some of the challenges facing Google, but the second part gets into more detail than we normally get into.

What’s even more interesting is that BusinessWeek put up transcripts of some of the interviews…

In September I didn’t do a 30 day challenge because, frankly, I had a lot of work that I really needed to crunch through at the Googleplex and I didn’t have much spare time. But October is a new month, and so it’s time for a new 30 day challenge.

For October, I’m not going to use any Microsoft software. No Microsoft operating systems (WinXP, Vista, or Windows 7) and no Microsoft Office allowed…

[I wrote this in January 2008 but never posted it. I think people might still want to read this, so I'm posting it now.]

In an election year, everybody gets a little more sensitive about politics, so I wanted a write a pre-emptive post in case anyone accuses Google of political bias in our search results sometime this year.

This is my personal opinion, but in my way of looking at the world, search quality > politics…

[A couple things to note: 1. This is a purely personal blog post--like other blogs posts I do, I haven't run it by anyone else at Google. 2. I'm writing it quickly because I have a lot of work to do. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I'll correct it.]

This morning I saw an article in the New York Times with the headline Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking:

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley…

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.

To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be…

I’ve really enjoyed making videos for webmasters. In the most recent recording session, we decided that it would be fun to talk about some of the “hidden gems” of Google: features, products, or tips that you might not know about, but you might like.

One of my favorite hidden Google gems is a program for Android phones called My Tracks. I like it enough that we made a short video about it…

…

Google launched Knol about a year ago. The big worry back then was that Google might favor Knol in our search rankings. I stopped around various places on the net to debunk that idea back then, but I think it’s safe to call this idea fully debunked now. As I said six months ago:

Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google’s rankings. When Knol launched, some people asked questions about this…

Some folks that I respect were giving me a bit of a hard time because they felt like I punted on this webmaster video:

So let me take another stab at the question, and tell me what you think. There’s a couple effects going on:
- first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely to see .coms in the UK. I’d say that’s 80-90% of the changes that people are seeing…

For the month of May, I didn’t watch any TV. I learned that I don’t miss summer TV that much.

For the month of June, I tried to walk 10,000 steps a day. I learned that a walk in the evening is a nice way to wind down and relax.

For the month of July, I biked into work. I learned:
- I don’t much like to bike to work. Part of it is probably that I have pretty old/crappy bike that doesn’t change gears quite right…

You can use Google Reader’s “Send To” feature for lots of fun things. Suppose you subscribe to a blog in another language, such as this French blog. You can add an “Autotranslate” custom link:

I used the values

Name: Autotranslate
URL: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=${url}
Icon URL: http://translate.google.com/favicon.ico

Then when you’re reading the blog, just click Send To -> Autotranslate:

And you’ll open the blog in Google Translate and be able to read the blog:

Fun stuff…

I’ve wanted this forever. Google Reader just added a feature where you can send items directly to Twitter, Reddit, and a bunch of other places:

To enable it, click on “Settings” in Google Reader and then click on the “Send To” tab to choose which services to add. Note: make sure you disable pop-up blocking so that Google Reader can pop-up a new window on twitter…

Google recently opened up a preview of our new Caffeine update, and I wanted to give a little more background on this change. At the Real-Time CrunchUp a few weeks ago, I joked that the half-life of code at Google is about six months. That means that you can write some code and when you circle back around in six months, about half of that code has been replaced with better abstractions or cleaner infrastructure…

I’ve decided what I want to do for August: read 15 books in 30 days. I read three books this weekend:

- The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich.
- Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh.
- World War Z, by Max Brooks.

I enjoyed all three. Now I need your help. What books would you recommend that I read in August?

…

I got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh.

So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out

Make your links appear Natural

Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant…

is starting off on the wrong foot…