Google Organizing Search Masters Conference

This morning I received an invitation from Google to attend the first ever official Google conference for webmasters. Search Masters 2009, as they have named it, will be held in Google’s Bangalore office on February 28th.

I was a little surprised to receive the email at first as I had no clue about such a conference happening and was actually considering to attend the SearchCamp 2009 in Chennai over the same weekend.

It is great to see that Google taking the initiative to meet the webmaster / SEO community in India. While there has been a few other SEO conferences in India over the last few years none of them saw any official representation from Google – also in the other International conferences though Google representatives actively participate, we have not seen Google organizing a similar conference.

The agenda of the conference would include discussion on Google Webmaster central and Best practices, Custom search, Webmaster Help Forum, Building Mobile friendly websites, Google analytics and website optimizer. Google’s Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik would also be there for an interactive session.

Indian Search Masters 2009 is the first official conference organized by Google ( the mail says so). Also, the invitation letter clearly mentions that the invitation is non-transferable and if you would like to nominate anyone else for attending the conference, it will be up to Google’s discretion to decide if that person is to be invited or not. The fact that Google has been selective in extending the invitation is really appreciated because my previous experience in some of the Search conferences in India shows that often the crowd is too big for any productive discussion and at times there is a huge difference between the knowledge level of the attendees that makes it boring for some.

*A small edit: This doesn’t seem to be the first one, though the invitation said “we would like to invite you to the first official conference for webmasters organized by Google.” it seems Google has done similar Search Master Conference in Brazil and Mexico last year.