I’ll be missing her Sandman t-shirts and Buffy references at the conferences, and I fear the subject matter will end up being a lot drier overall for her lack.

Though I don’t know that she’d need any SEO help, I must say that I happen to know a thing or two about local search optimization, if she would like to call me in for advice at Zillow!

In appreciation for Vanessa, with warmest regards, here’s a little list I composed of the Top Ten Reasons Vanessa Left Google:

10. Vanessa got tired of being stalked by all the odd SEO geeks out there, like the strange man in the long black coat who starts hovering around behind her three-quarters of the way through this video interview between her and Rand.

9. Vanessa began to realize that Google is actually The Borg, and she decided to go through the painful surgeries necessary to divest herself from the hive-mind.

8. Vanessa resigned after the Google Image Search team refused to give her top ranking for her blog’s keywords “Vanessa Fox Nude“. (WARNING: link into Google Image Search for “vanessa fox nude” is NOT work-safe unless you have Strict SafeSearch enabled in your Google preference settings!)

7. Though generally a secret, Vanessa’s moonlighting job kicking the butt of Black-Hat SEO Vampires was leaving her way too tired for the day job on Webmaster Central. Those Black-Hat SEO Vampires really suck the link-juice outta stuff! (Vanessa, was this why you didn’t make it to our morning panel session on Images & Search at the NYC SES this Spring?!? Also, btw - don’t we have Dave Naylor to thank for the name of Vanessa’s blog? Starting to think Dave may’ve played “Xander” to Vanessa’s “Buffy”… or maybe Dave as “Spike” would be more apt?)

6. A technically-challenged administrator within Google leapt to the incorrect conclusion that Vanessa was secretly assisting spammers when they came across her blog entry on “7 steps to writing better spam email (or what to do if you’ve got an overstock of viagra)“. That dorky bureaucrat within Google secretly campaigned to boot Vanessa out of the company. Some percentage of people are always misunderstanding satire.

5. Amanda Camp was refusing to play “Willow” to Vanessa’s “Buffy”. Sets of twins, separated at birth? Compare:

Amanda Camp and Vanessa Fox

Buffy and Willow

4. Despite moving to England, Danny Sullivan could never master the British accent sufficiently to play “Giles” to Vanessa’s “Buffy”. Vanessa’s angst at the failure drove her on to new pastures.

(photo by Lee Odden)

3. Google’s free food for employees obsession was ruining Vanessa’s new starvation diet.

2. Despite ernestly trying, Vanessa was unable to get the rest of the Webmaster Central team to start referring to her as “Vanessa, the SEO Black Hat Vampire Killer”.

And… last but not least:

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1. When invited to work elsewhere, Vanessa misunderstood and thought they offered for her to “work with Willow” instead of “Zillow“.

Rand Fishkin: Duplicate content filter, is that the same or different to a duplicate content penalty?
Vanessa Fox: So I think there is a lot of confusion about this issue. I think people think that if Google sees information on a site that is duplicate within the site then there will some kind of penalty applied (duplicating its own material). There’s a couple of different ways this can happen, one if you use subpages that seem to have a lot of content that is the same, e.g. a local type site that says here is information about Boulder and here’s information about Denver, but it doesn’t actually have any information about Boulder, it just says Boulder in one place and Denver in the other. But otherwise the pages are exactly the same. Another scenario is where you have multiple URL’s that point to the same exact page, e.g. a dynamic site. So those are two times when you have duplicate content within a site.

Fishkin: So would you call that a filter or would you call that a penalty, do you discriminate between the two?
Fox: There is no penalty. We don’t apply any kind of penalty to a site that has that situation. I think people get more worried than they should about it because they think oh no, there’s going to be a penalty on my site because I have duplicate content. But what is going to happen is some kind of filtering, because in the search results page we want to show relevant, useful pages instead of showing ten URLs that all point to the same page – which is probably not the best experience for the user. So what is going to happen is we are going to only index one of those pages. So if you don’t care, in the instance where there are a lot of URLs that all point to the same exact page, if you don’t care which one of them is indexed then you don’t have to do anything, Google will pick one and we’ll index it and it will be fine.

Fishkin: So let’s say I was looking for the optimal Google experience and I was trying to optimize my site to the best of my ability, would I then say well maybe it isn’t so good for me to have Google crawling my site pages I know are duplicates (or very similar), let me just give them the pages I know they will want?
Fox: Right, so you can do that, you can redirect versions…we can figure it out, it’s fine, we have a lot of systems. But if you care which version of the site is indexed, and you don’t want us to hit your site too much by crawling all these versions, then yeah, you might want to do some things, you can submit sitemaps and tell us which version of the page you want, you can do a redirect, you can block with robots, you can not serve us session IDs. I mean there’s a lot of different things you could do in that situation. In the situation where the pages are just very similar, it’s sort of a similar situation where you want to make the pages as unique as possible. So that’s sort of a different solution to the similar sort of problem. You want to go, ok, how can I make my page about Boulder, different from my page about Denver, or maybe I just need one page about Colorado if I don’t have any information about the other two pages.