Search Tech – 2009 Winner

Let’s skip the corny, canned jokes and the awkward moments at the podium and just open the envelope, shall we? Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of the 2009 SEMMY Award in the Search Tech category is … drum-roll, please …

Getting URLs outta Google – the good, the popular, and the definitive way
Sebastian X | 1/14/08

Congratulations to our winner! Here’s a choice bit from the winning post:

First of all, if you really want that search engines don’t index your stuff, you must allow them to crawl it. And no, that’s not an oxymoron. At the moment there’s no such thing as an indexer directive on site-level. You can’t forbid indexing in robots.txt. All indexer directives require crawling of the URLs that you want to keep out of the SERPs. Of course that doesn’t mean you should serve search engine crawlers a book from each forbidden URL.

Runners-Up

The top two runners-up in public voting were:

1. SEM Basics: How to Use a Proxy IP in Firefox
   Nick Wilsdon | 11/1/08
2. Managing Robot’s Access To Your Website
   Vanessa Fox, Jane and Robot | 6/4/08

The winner and runners-up are welcome to grab the appropriate badge — we have a badge for both winners and runners-up.

How the Voting Ended

Here’s a look at how each finalist fared in the public voting:

Thanks to all who voted, and congrats again to the winner, runners-up, finalists, and all nominees. We look forward to reading your acceptance speech soon!