There are some pages on sites that you don't necessarily want to have indexed. Some of them are easy to find because they fulfill important purposes on sites, but still shouldn't be crawled and indexed. Others can be considerably more difficult to find.

At the Google I/O Developers Conference last week, we were introduced to the future of Search, or as Google's Head of Search Quality Amit Singhal called it, the "death of search." The presentations from the day long event told us that features like Google Now will provide information to us as we need it, rather than when we ask for it.

Back in 1997 I was a webmaster for a site that incorporated businesses in Delaware. In those days, promoting a site meant finding ways to deliver traffic to its pages, and building relationships with other site owners and businesses. PageRank was unheard of at the time, and the idea of anchor text being used as a relevance signal for web pages wasn't anything we were concerned with at all.

In the past couple of years, we've been seeing Google bring a level of social activity and awareness to Google that was missing in the past. They've developed meta data approaches that enable authors to connect their Google Account with web pages they write at and contribute to. They've also set up a way for businesses to connect their sites to Google profiles as publishers.

Linkbuilding isn't dead, and it likely won't be any time soon, but it has changed over the past few years, and the search engines are looking at other signals as well, such as social sharing...

The Webimax blog went through a redesign recently, and one of the sections that we were happy to add was an ask the experts section, where people can submit questions about online marketing, and get an answer from one of the many professionals at Webimax.

Maps are not my friend. Or at least they haven't been in the past, whether lost on the side of a road with a big unfolded paper map that I can't find myself upon, or driving directions from Google or Yahoo or Mapquest that get me 99% of the way to my destination only to lose me in the last mile. Maps don't seem to be Apple's friend lately either, with a lot of negatives hurled their way in recent weeks over their new mapping program that launched with the new iPhone 5.

This summer, Google announced that they were coming out with a program called Google Now, which seems to be Google's answer to Siri. As a digital assistant, it anticipates your informational and situational needs almost before you do.

On Monday night, I had the chance to give a presentation for the Agile SEO Meetup at the Webimax headquarters in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. There was a nice turnout, including many Maxers* who started their day early, and stayed late or returned for the presentation. It takes a team to make a meetup work, and I wanted to express my thanks to the Maxers who set up the presentation equipment and the live-streamed webinar, who set up tables and chairs and signs, who made sure we had something to drink, and who helped promote the event. I'm not going to mention names, because I'm sure I'd leave someone out, but you know who you are.

In the start of every football season, the first few games are often a surprise in terms of how well or how poorly some teams play. One team yesterday, picked by many to be a potential Superbowl, participant barely eked out a victory over a rival that isn't expected to fare quite as well. Other teams won by wide margins over teams expected to be much more competitive.

How much is a search engine like a human being when it comes to gathering data in the world around it and making judgments about that data?

Optimization is the effort to try to make something the best that it can be.

I remember when Google had been out for about a year or so, back when I was promoting a single website in-house. I was really cautious about making changes to the site because we were ranking well for terms we cared about, and I was afraid that a single change could possibly take that away. I remember making lots of small changes slowly, and then waiting patiently to see if they had some kind of impact.

I have a morning ritual that I like to follow most workdays. I like to stop for breakfast at one of the nearby coffee houses or bakeries and sit down with a newspaper, some coffee, and something to eat, and spend some time talking with some of my neighbors. Seems like many of them are older, and while I get some questions about things like how to reduce the amount of email spam they received, I usually learn more in those conversations than I'd ever imagined.

SEO is an ever evolving discipline, and keeping on top of changes is one of the challenges that any SEO faces. This means that the typical SEO spends part of their day researching what the search engines say they are doing, keeping in touch with what other SEOs are writing about, exploring new websites and new business models on the Web, participating in social networks and other sites where news and information and ideas are shared.

This is the first edition of a new feature on the Optimized Times. We will be looking back at some of the posts related to search and SEO from the previous week, and pointing out some of the ones that we find interesting.

A recently granted Google patent provides a peek at how the search engine addresses some of the problems it might have as a business, a site owner, and an information provider.

Search for [jaguar] in Google and you'll see some results for the animal, the brand of cars, and even a result for the NFL football team in Jacksonville, Florida. Imagine that if you clicked on the result for the football team that subsequent search results that you might see from Google in the same search session might be influenced by that selection. Those search results might be re-ranked based upon a contextual search model based upon classifications of the web sites you visit.

The first days of summer, and the mercury in my thermometer raced for triple digits yesterday afternoon. This is my first blog post on the Webimax blog, and I'm excited at the chance to share this space with some people who are very enthusiastic and excited about search and SEO, and the growing social and semantic Web.