At the end fo February, representatives from all four of the major search engines - Ask, Yahoo!, MSN & Google - will be attending a conference on the topic of search engine indexing. A fantastic indexing thread, started by the conference organizer, Danny Sullivan, has brought up some of the most contentious issues facing webmasters and search engines.

A list of the items that have been discussed so far on the thread include:

• The formation of a standards organization, as mentioned by Xan at his blog and many other parties over the last 6 months.
• Referrer IDs in query strings
• Ratification and standardization of commands like the MSN robots.txt crawl-delay
• Mike Grehan's complaints about Filthy Linking rich
• The handling of 302 re-directs, also known in our community as "page-hijacking"
• Methods for making search more temporally aligned with content (letting new content flourish, rather than wither)

This is a very important time in the search engine optimization world. It could set the tone for the next few years' relationships between the SEs and SEOs/SEMs. I personally have a lot of faith that things can move forward smoothly and that we can find a way to grow this industry successfully together.