Site speed has been a hot topic ever since Matt Cutts indicated it would be a critical part of the Caffeine Update. According to Michael Martin of Internet Marketing, Inc., it is just another move toward the evolving mobile market.

Numerous factors such as Flash can slow a site down, but Martin told WebProNews that those factors were, “… a micro millisecond difference, but that’s gonna be part of the factors of 2010.”

Incidentally, Android recently celebrated its second birthday. Although no Android device has yet to emerge as the “iPhone Killer,” there have been several Android devices released recently. Droid is probably the most popular and is already on Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. It is expected to be on AT&T around the first of the year as well.

Martin compares the Android/iPhone battle to the PC/MAC wars and says that it wasn’t very long ago that no one was familiar with Android, but now it’s everywhere. Where will Android go next?

Site speed has become a recently hot topic, especially with Google rolling out its Caffeine update very soon. In an interview with WebProNews, Google’s Matt Cutts indicated that speed would play a large role in ranking in the future.

As the emphasis on speed increases, Bill Hartzer of Vizion Interactive predicts that the quality of content will increase as well. He believes the standards will be higher for which content is indexed and which is not.

With Caffeine, Google hopes to identify and focus more on unique content instead of focusing on aggregation sites. Also, the company is expected to improve its duplicate content filter.

To make sure your website measures up to these new standards, Hartzer suggests checking the usability on your site. For starters, test the load time of your site to see if it is efficient. In addition, as you produce relevant content, see that it is crawled first by putting it on multiple social sites. Although Yahoo has not put a strong emphasis on real-time Web content, both Google and Bing have.

Posted by randfish

I’m a big Google fan – my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I’ve even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this.

Here’s what Google themselves has to say on the matter:

You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page URL.

To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Your site on the web, click Links to your site.

Note: Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.

Here’s what Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) had to say in a video on the subject:

The short answer is that historically, we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because web search was the main part and we didn’t have a ton of servers for link colon queries and so, we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample. It’s a relatively small percentage. And I think that that’s a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone’s rankings.

Google themselves is telling us not to pay too much attention to the link command, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping folks. Let the myth busting commence.

Myth #1 – The Google Link Command Returns Accurate Numbers

Nope. Not even close. Google themselves say the numbers aren’t accurate and that they’re showing a small sub-sample. The numbers show this as well. Check your link counts with the Google link command vs. the number inside Google’s Webmaster Tools (when you verify your account, you’ll see them shown). Here’s the stats for SEOmoz, for example:

Google’s link command claims 1,590 links. Let’s see what Webmaster Tools says:

Hmm… 381,403 seems slightly larger than 1,590. In fact, the link command is showing me 0.4% of what Webmaster Tools says exists. Running this analysis on another few domains that we have access to in Webmaster Tools, I saw numbers ranging from 0.1% to 4.4% (meaning there’s not even any consistency between in the percentage of links from the two counts). 

Myth #2 – The Google Link Command Returns Important Links

Tragically, a long time ago (pre-2004), Google did show only important links via the link: command, which created the myth that exists to this day. In fact, the links shown in the link: command have no particular importance or relevance. They are truly a random sample, including links that are nofollowed, links from pages that have had PageRank penalties applied to them as well as links that do pass link juice and value.

Myth #3 – The Google Link Command Returns Links in Some Kind of Order

No one in SEO has been able to show any ordering of any kind in the Google link: command’s results. Important, well-known websites may be listed on page 2 or page 20 of the results, and it is likewise with spam, scrapers and low quality sites that Google’s likely not counting. In Site Explorer and the web results, Yahoo! appears to do some type of ordering, tending to show more important links, pages and sites before less important ones (though not with great consistency). Unfortunately, many SEOs suspect that, should Microsoft’s deal to power Yahoo! with Bing results go through, Yahoo! is unlikely to maintain their own web index (and thus, link, linkdomain and site explorer will be gone).

As exemplified above, Google appears to be very random indeed when showing link: results.

Myth #4 – The Google Link Command Returns a Numerically Representative Count of Links

This is possibly the myth that’s most disturbing of all, primarily because so many operators in the SEO field belive it and track the link: command count as a reliable, useful metric. Nothing could be further from the truth – and here’s some data to help back it up:

Root Domain	Google Link: # (external + internal?)	Yahoo! Linkdomain # (external only)	Linkscape Count (external only)
Yahoo.com	3,650	331,000,000	201,681,667
Recovery.gov	7,550	328,000	155,780
Facebook.com	165,000	567,000,000	116,748,934
Real.com	11,400	4,600,000	5,596,165
Adobe.com	51,200	124,000,000	78,550,468
Reddit.com	18,300	128,000,000	29,071,291
Twitter.com	224,000	515,000,000	132,528,763
Salon.com	12,300	3,420,000	1,535,342
SEOmoz.org	1,590	957,000	486,405
NYTimes.com	7,990	21,200,000	12,884,758
TurkeyDayRun.com	3	68	22
Ninme.com	539	42,000	3,149
Burgerking.com	942	106,000	23,761
Alaskaair.com	1,010	44,000	38,358
Smashingmagazine.com	8,730	1,130,000	592,054
Smithsonian.org	4,860	25,700	14,545

I collected the data above spur of the moment, so I won’t try to claim great statistical integrity. However, looking at Google’s link: command results, the best I can say is that Google has some relationship to the others within 1-2 orders of magnitude, though they may be directionally inaccurate much of the time as well. Just look at the NYTimes.com for example – Google claims they have 2/3rds the links that Salon.com has, yet Yahoo! and Linkscape agree that, in fact, NYTimes.com has 6X+ Salon.com’s link total.

These are not numbers you want to hang your hat (or any crucial business decisions) on.

Myth #5 – The Google Link Command Tracks Accurately Over Time

Unfortunately, I don’t have data points I can show, but our observations over time indicate that Google’s link count in Webmaster Tools might rise, along with the Yahoo! and Linkscape link counts, yet the Google link: command will show lower numbers. The reverse is sometimes also the case. Without directional consistency, even when compared against their own counts, it’s very hard to take the Google link: count seriously.

Myth #6 – The Google Link Command is Up to Date

Most SEOs & webmasters have noticed that the Google link: counts update infrequently, inconsistently and most often in correlation with toolbar PageRank updates (another data point I’ll need to takcle in a future post). These updates from Google occur every 2-10 months with little warning about when they’re coming or have happened. If you watch sites like <a href="http://www.seroundtable.com"SERoundtable closely, they’ll report many of these as they occur.

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The next time someone tells you their Google link: command numbers as a metric for SEO, competitive analysis or anything else, make sure they read this post. Google’s not nearly as up-front with the information as they should be (honestly, removing the link command would save so much time and effort for poor site owners who get needlessly confused), but hopefully as a community, we can help build more awareness around this issue.

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Back in August, WebProNews first told you about Google’s Caffeine update. As Matt Cutts told us then, the Caffeine project would provide improvements to Google’s indexing structure. Despite concerns from some users about the impact on search results, Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick told WPN that caffeine is in fact live at one data center.

He said the update was rolled out around 3 or 4 AM EST yesterday. Matt Cutts later confirmed the news in a blog post. Because it is only live at one data center, only a small number of Google users will experience Caffeine.

Although both Cutts and Google have indicated that there would not likely be a noticeable difference in search results, Schwartz says that any time the content in the index changes, the results will change as well.

In 2003, Google issued its Florida Update around this same time of year. Merchants and retailers were hit hard since millions of listings from the search results were reportedly dropped. Schwartz believes it is for this reason that Google is only releasing it to one data center. In his blog post, Cutts also assured users that the full launch would not take place until after the holidays.

While the location of the data center was not revealed, Schwartz expects webmasters to determine the specifics very soon.

What do you think about Google’s Caffeine update? Have you tested it? To what extent do you believe the search results will be impacted?

Posted by randfish

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.

Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more "white hat" kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.

As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts. Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.

I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:

Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring to Bing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:

• Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
• The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the "old crusty links" paradigm may be fading a bit.
• Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
• Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
• QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
• Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
• Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
• Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
• Billions of non-linked "references" flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.

As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.

Now we just have to figure out the tactics…

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Posted by jennita

This post really doesn’t need much of an introduction, so I’ll get right down to it. Pubcon is coming! Pubcon is cooommiiinnnnggggg! It seems like the whole industry might just shut down for a week while we take over Las Vegas (I hope they’re ready for us). This would probably be a great time for spammers to come in and take over our SERPs since we’ll be busy in sessions, going to parties, meeting new people… and gambling (DUDE! It’s Vegas).

SEOmoz will be representing in full force this year. Although we don’t have a booth, you’ll find us lurking in all corners of the event. Here’s a quick lowdown on who will be attending from the moz crew:

• Danny – Say "Danny Dover" ten times fast. What?! It’s funny. Really. (ok I’m tired)
• Scott – He’s coming out from behind the camera!
• Adam – Ping him if you’re interested in user testing some of our new products!
• Jen – Holla!
• Arden – You’ll recognize him by being the friendly one (unlike the rest of us meanies)
• Rand – You know, that guy who always wears those funny yellow shoes
• Gillian – She arrives just in time from her worldwide SEO tour
• Pete – As in Dr. Pete, apparently people only know him by that name.

Speaking of Dr. Pete, don’t forget to check out his post 7 Tips for Surviving PubCon to help you make it through the week.

Party Party Party!

I know I know, quit blabbing and get to the good stuff. SEOmoz will be hosting the 3rd Annual Search Spam / Werewolf party on Tuesday night. Tickets are unfortunately limited to 200 people and are for SEOmoz Pro members plus guests, so be sure to RSVP right away before they’re gone!

Here are the details:

Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Time: 7-9pm
Location: Wynn Hotel – Chambertin Room
Drinks: 1 free drink ticket per person, cash bar after that

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

 

 

 

This week’s roll up mixes a little bit of awesome with a little bit of awesomely bad. But regardless of whether or not you threw a Windows 7 launch party at your house, from Talk Like a Pirate Day to actionable SEO tips, the search industry had no shortage of entertaining headlines over the last couple weeks of September.

• 69 Free Tools to Improve Your Website:
  The Grok, Brian Eisenberg, who rolled out a self branded site, shares a great list of usability and marketing tools.

• Google Launches DoubleClick Ad Exchange:
  95% of Google’s revenue still come from search ads, but with the new DoubeClick Ad Exchange Google is poised to increase their display ad business.

• Matt Cutts – Meta Keywords Not a Google Ranking Factor:
  Matt Cutts or Jay-Z? (If I had a nickel for every time I asked that.) In the video on the Google Webmaster Blog, Matt Cutt’s breaks it down like Beyonce’s beau: Google’s got 99 ranking factors, but a meta keyword ain’t one.

• Maintaining Visual Consistency During A/B Tests:
  Testing competing features can move the conversion needle, but at what detriment to user experience? In a post about maximizing the effectiveness of split tests Andrew Chen talks about the importance of having a central visual design.

• SEOmoz Linkbuilding Guide Updated:
  Thanks to Eric Enge’s hard work, an updated version of the Professional’s Guide to Linkbuilding (free for paying PRO members) is now live on the site. Notable updates include adaptations for the inception of Bing, changes in nofollow, and more detailed explanations in select areas.

• Seth Godin’s Brands in Public:
  Though Godin’s Squidoo powered tool was beaten up for how it was rolled out, he promptly did some damage control and changed the tool from being opt-out to opt-in.

• Delving into the Long Tail:
  Rand talked about long tail searches the other week, but Seer Interactive’s blog post on the long tail serves as a great visual guide to conducting keyword research to identifying your greatest long tail opportunities.

• Top Web Analytics Pain Points:
  Integrating web analytics with other marketing solutions and verifying data accuracy topped the list in Unica’s survey of most common analytics headaches.

• Google Analytics API – Event Tracking:
  You may use the the Google Analytics API to push data to your CRM system. Now, for those with video content, the analytics API can also be used for event tracking.

• Bing Continues to Increase Market Share:
  Google may still be the 800 lb gorilla, but Bing has definitely gained some traction over the last couple of months.

• Introduction to AdWords Bidding Tutorial Video:
  Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, lays out some great tips for beginner’s on how to get started with bid price management.

• Most People Don’t Like Being Ad Targeted:
  The study cited by the NY Times stating that two thirds of people don’t like being ad targeted sparked several follow up posts from both Greg Sterling and Matt Cutts. Regardless of your take on how the study was conducted, the article is worth a read.

• Go For it on 4th Down:
  The statistics support always going for it on 4th down, yet football coaches rarely do. The fascinating New York Times article begs the question of how similar thinking can be applied to your business.     

• Great Linkbait From The Guardian:
  The Guardian released several map infographics that give insight into the global recession.

• Pirate SEO Advice:
  Reading the SEO Skeptic post by Cap’n Long John Keyword is a humorous way to enjoy a belated celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

• New Google Keyword Research Tool in Beta:
  Google rolls out a new and improved keyword tool that has advanced filtering and also pulls in data from Google Insights.

• Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment:
  The Marketing Experiments Blog shares a list of seven things you can test on your site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

• Yahoo’s New Search User Experiece:
  Yahoo search rolls out a revamped look and feel with increased performance and more personalization.

• Searches for Linkbait Ideas:
  Anne Smarty’s list of ways to uncover linkbait offers several useful queries you can use to identify possible linkbait opportunities.

Top YOUmoz entries:

1. * Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz by MikeTek (Promoted to the main blog)

2. The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO by  Gil Reich

3. Startup or Corporation? The Life Changing Decision by Mgete

4. Parable of the Lost Link by interactivevoices

• Windows 7 Launch Commercial:
  Just when you thought it didn’t get any better than Songsmith the Windows 7 marketing team reminds us that Microsoft research is not the only Redmond team with an ad campaign that belongs on a VH1 awesomely bad list. And for those who have seen the original, the parody is fantastic, too. 

• Bank Emails Sensitve Information to Wrong Emails:
  All PR is good PR… unless of course you are the Rocky Mountain Bank and you emailed social security, password, and other info to over 1,300 of the wrong Gmail users. Oops!

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It looks like Google could have a fight on its hands as sponsored blogging and tweeting are becoming increasingly popular. The search giant has always taken a very strong stand against the controversial topic of paid links and although the debate has quieted in recent years, Michael Gray believes it is about to get revived and expanded upon.

The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly drafting guidelines for bloggers who promote products specifically when conflicts of interest are not disclosed to readers. In spite of that pending regulation, Google is raising concerns since its search engine cannot fully discern all paid and sponsored blog posts. The company recently frowned upon the practice at a recent blogger event.

Although paid sponsorships are commonplace in traditional media, Gray says people have the ability to distinguish when it is happening and when it is not. The Internet however is a whole new space in which the sponsorships are not as obvious.

As a result, Google is struggling to figure out how to handle the issue. The company would like to see more user data and multiple sources that verify the post and links. As Matt Cutts of Google said on his blog: “We [Google] take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them.”

What are your thoughts regarding sponsored posts? Do you believe it’s wrong?

Google announced yesterday that it has been working on a project called “Caffeine” that will re-write the architecture for Google’s Web search. As Matt Cutts shares exclusively with WebProNews, Caffeine is comparable to the “Big Daddy Update” back in 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

If you would like to try Caffeine, you can check it out at: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.

Stay tuned to WebProNews as we continue to bring you exclusive coverage from SES San Jose 2009.

Posted by jennita

This past week at SES San Jose 2009 gave me the most mixed emotions of any conference I’ve attended yet. There were parts I loved and parts I was disappointed in. Add that with trying to complete regular work plus cover the conference for SEOmoz, believe me it was a bit crazy. Some of you may have also heard about the rough start I had to the conference… I booked the wrong flight home, had to find a hotel last minute, wasn’t on the list for a press pass (which they fixed right away), the list goes on and on really. Still, I didn’t let this stop me from learning new things, meeting new people and on the last day (after 2 full days of stalking), I nabbed an interview with Matt Cutts.

As with anything in life really, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. This is true for search marketing conferences and for SES San Jose, it was no different. Whenever I attend a large conference or even small meet-ups, I’m in awe of the people who organize the event. It can’t be easy to coordinate everyone from speakers to attendees, from booth setup to making sure everyone is fed (more on that below). You would have to know that as you’re working your butt off to get everything done, that there will be people who love and others who hate certain aspects of the event. For me, that is the beauty of it, I mean how boring would it be if we all loved everything all the time? So please, follow along, as I bring you the good, the bad and the downright funny from the conference.

The Good

The types of speakers you have in any given session can either make or break it. The topic could be something as exciting as Black Hat vs. White Hat but if the speaker is as dull as dishwater then the entire session comes to a screeching halt (and people fall asleep in the first row). However on the flip side, when a speaker is so dynamic that he or she can keep a crowd of several hundred people interested in analytics right after lunch, then you have a winner in my book!

If you’ve ever seen Avinash Kaushik from Google speak, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Right after lunch on the first day, Avinash spoke at the session "How to Turn Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine." This is one of those sessions where you know you’ll probably learn some good information but only if you can keep yourself awake long enough. Not in this instance. Avinash started with great one liners like "Life is not a one night stand" and one of his slides was labeled: "Sexy: Search + Display." He knew exactly how to keep the audience interested and laughing the entire time. The biggest take-away by the audience seemed to be when he was asked what tool he used to find all his data, and he said he used Google Ad Planner. I’m pretty sure Google saw a spike in usage soon after!

I went to the "SEO Tools of the Trade: What’s in your Toolbox?" session a little miffed that SEOmoz wasn’t represented and was ready to ask the speakers about it. With six speakers plus the moderator there wasn’t time to ask any questions (see "the bad") but I made sure I made myself known by sitting right up front with my SEOmoz T-Shirt on. Although not one of the speakers mentioned SEOmoz (boooooo) I actually walked away with a few additional tools in my toolbelt because of it. It was interesting because many of the speakers had tools of their own, and most pitched them. What I liked though was that Bruce Clay spoke about what to look for in a tool and what kinds of tools to look for. He didn’t preach about how awesome his tools were, but gave excellent, useful information about finding the right tool (it would have been even better had had the chance to explain how we have a tool for every one of the points he made.

In the "Search: Where to Next?" session, I loved that Chris Boggs mentioned SEOmoz as one of his favorite blogs. Woot!

Although the speakers can make the sessions, there were a few other gems that made my "thumbs up" list. As usual, the exhibitors had great schwag. I loved that the first two rows in each section were reserved for the press. This allowed all the live bloggers and others to have a place to sit and type their hearts out. I’ve seen many people trying to live blog with their laptops in their lap. And speaking of live bloggers I have to give a shout out to my roommate Keri Morgret who I coined the name "best roommate ever" for bringing chocolate muffins, coffee and other yummies to the room.

I can’t forget to mention the great networking and evening events that took place. For me, networking was one of the most valuable aspects of the conference. Searchbash that was put on by WebmasterRadio.fm and the IM Charity Party were great fun and I loved meeting new people and spending time with friends.

The Bad

Every conference has its issues, and let’s be honest here, you can never please everyone. SES San Jose had a few "thumbs down" in my opinion. There were the poor people at the superpages.com booth who had to wear bright yellow capes (as torture of manning a booth for two days). Or the very nice lady at AOL who stood alone while most of the other booths were packed with people. I hate to even mention the food since really I’ve seen many blogs already talk about this… but sheesh! They served us the SAME FOOD for 3 days in a row. It was also strange that around 11am every day, the coffee seemed to disappear. Uhm, hello! We need coffee to keep us going through the full days (and some to get over that hangover).

Then there are the speakers. Often times in a tech oriented industry you’ll get a speaker who knows her business but come on, she really has no right speaking to large audiences. Other times you may find someone who knows his information so well he seems to get lost in the speech and forgets he is supposed to be talking to the audience and not just within his own head. Or what about the moderator who feels she has to ask each speaker a question after their presentation to ensure everyone knows she paid attention? This conference also seemed to have more speakers than most sessions could handle and several times there was no time for Q & A, which in my opinion is usually the most valuable aspect.

There were a few who seemed a bit nervous and others who read straight from the Powerpoint presentation (this is when the afternoon coffee would have come in handy). I can definitely understand being nervous; speaking in front of hundreds of people is quite nerve racking, even if you know the topic inside and out. But one thing I had a hard time with was hearing a speaker give outright bad (or at least, incomplete) information.

Now, I’m far from perfect, and I’m positive I’ve lead people down the wrong track before so I’ll give Stoney deGeyter from Pole Position Marketing the benefit of the doubt that perhaps I misinterpreted him. However in the "Search on a Dime" session he told the audience that the meta description was not valuable, and that if they didn’t have time to do it to just let the search engines find the content of the page and determine what to put there. EEK!

This was said to a group of small business owners who were looking for ways to rank well without spending a ton of money. They should have been told how the meta description is unimportant for ranking factors but that it is UBER important for the ever-important click-through! Small business owners should know that having unique meta descriptions is essential and making sure that they’re created to entice users to click that link in the SERP and pull people into their site. The idea that leaving anything up to a search engine seems rather ridiculous. (It also didn’t help matters that when asked how he suggested getting developers to make the necessary changes on the site his answer was "Tell them to make the change and if they say no, fire them." As a former full-time developer this really left a bad taste in my mouth.)

By the way, the entire session wasn’t bad, in fact David Mihm’s presentation was spot on. He gave us excellent information about local search without so much as pimping out his ridiculously awesome site GetListed.org. Even Matt Van Wagner showed us step by step how he put together a local search campaign, although I wasn’t too sure how that related to search marketing on a budget, but it was still good information.

The Funny

There was one particular quote that seriously made me laugh out loud. It really tickled my funny bone when Pavan Li from Microsoft was trying to get something to work on her computer while she was taking questions and she said "We’re used to making simple things complicated." The room lit up with laughter after that one!

Later that same day, after Avinash had explained how rich old men search for Paris Hilton more often than other groups, Mike Grehan the moderator, took the mic to announce the next speaker and said "I’m just an average guy looking for pictures of Paris Hilton."

The highlight on the last day, was the "Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic." With Matt Cutts, Greg Boser, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox reviewing websites, it could have been pretty straightforward and down to business. However the session started with a review of mypleasure.com and ended with hookah-shisha.com. Let’s just say there were many blushing faces throughout the entire session and at one point Vanessa said, "and I would listen to what Matt says because he started in porn" to which Matt responded (after a few seconds of the audience laughing), "What Vanessa means by that is the first thing I did at Google was that I worked in safe search…" Hah!

I’m sure there were many more funny moments but as a one woman show I couldn’t be in all places at one time. With that, I’ll end with my favorite quote which came from Chris Boggs on the first day, "SEO is alive, long live SEO!"

PS: Most images courtesy of Dana Lookadoo, Search Marketing Optimizer, Yo! Yo! SEO. (She took tons of great photos at the conference)

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