April 21st, 2010 by Glenn

This is my live blog of Day 1. Here's my live blog of Day 2 of SMX Sydney 2010…

So I'm gonna have a go at live-blogging SMX Sydney. If you couldn't make it down to Sydney for SMX, and you still want to hear what's being said, shortcut or bookmark this post, and I'll try to keep you updated.

A word of warning though: This post will be the product of a constant, ugly battle between my Shrek-like sausage fingers and a laptop that's most definitely made for someone a little more petite. So don't be surprised to see the occasional typo as I pound madly at the keyboard in a valiant (but no doubt vain) attempt to keep up with the day's inspiring speakers.

And one other thing: I'll be very SEO focussed. I'm not attending the PPC-type sessions at all. And I won't be blogging every little tid-bit that's said. Just the big tasty morsels that you may not have heard around the SEO traps.

Ok. So let's get to it…

Session 1: Keynote: Future Directions in Search! (Chris Sherman, Executive Editor – Searchengineland.com)

Google

• $54B online global ad spend in 2009. 47% of it on search.
• Remember Google went from upstart to everything in just 10 years.
• Google Fast Flip — Attempt to appease news orgs. Kinda graphical version of Google News. Retains news orgs' brand.
• Google News Timeline — Tracks news day by day (threaded).
• Google Accounts – Google Dashboard enables you to see what Google knows about you, and is tracking about you. You can control some of what they're capturing.
• Google Local Business Center changed yesterday to Google Places.
• Google has hired a team of photographers to go inside businesses (for Google Street View, and may be tied into AdWords). Will be the next big local search wave.
• YouTube Promoted Videos. (In Aus, you need an AdWords account.)
• Google AdWords Webinar — AdWords tips specific to Aus.
• Chris believes Facebook is far looser with privacy than Google, but Google is being branded the 'New Evil Empire'.
• Google has moved .cn servers to Hong Kong. China still blocking mainland access to them.
• Chris says China not as restrictive as the Western Media would have you believe. He's presented 4 times there and never been restricted. If you're knowledgable, you can access Google with proxies. China wants to limit access by people WITHOUT intelligence and rational thought!
• Search for article "The Connection Has Been Reset" (James Fellows/Follows?) for discssion of China.
• Gov requests tool — Data requests & removal requests by governments (shows Google's % compliance with requests). About 80% of US gov requests were complied with.

Yahoo

• Yahoo situation. Chris believes they've taken steps to 'sunset' themselves. MS will do all the heavy lifting (Bing will supply the results). Yahoo will continue to sell ads. Chris believes they're going back to their Browse model. They see themselves as a media company: trying to keep people on Yahoo, rather than redirecting them elsewhere.

Microsoft

• Microsoft bought DOS for USD $75k in 1981.
• Consiracy theory: Bing = Bing Is Not Google
• Bing Maps Labs — Museum (today's front pages from around the world), What's Nearby, other cool stuff. Extending beyong the paradigm of finding and navigating. Overlaying historical photos on street view images.
• Chris believes we'll start interacting more with maps as a primary search interface. So to be a leader, take advantage of this, and other new interfaces.
• Travel Schedule. Works best (or, according to @philipshaw, ONLY) in US. Captured millions of data points from online travel services. Build a graph to show best time to buy a ticket (to save most money). Eg. Will tell you if there's some event that will likely cause your tickets to double in price.
• Bing XRank — Popularity of celebs in search. (Useful for keyword research for search ad campaigns.)

Wolfram Alpha

• Claim they're not a search engine. They're a knowledge engine.
• Good for queries that Google/Bing wouldn't have a clue what to do with. E.g. More information on mathematical equations. Or a weird string that's part of the genomic string. Will map it. Search "C major 7th chord" Wolfram Alpha will play it. "Cities with population greater than 5 million". "Father's mother's sister's son" — will illustrate with a diagram. "Probability of a full house" poker hand. "10 peanut M&Ms" will compute nutritional value. "Who is the fairest of them all?" "When will I die?" "Am I drunk?"
• "Is laughter the best medicine" can't do it. Referred to a drug database.

Social Media

• Avg person spends 16% of online time on Facebook, 9% on Facebook, and only 5% on Google.
• Social media surpassed email (in terms of total users) in 2009.
• Total time spent: email has flatlined. Social media is still growing as fast as it was in 2006.

Twitter

• Google 88B queries per month, Twitter 19B, Yahoo 9.4B, Bing 4.1B (stats may be somewhat unreliable).
• 75% of its traffic is thru APIs so above number may be lower than real number.
• Search via twitter is a really serious source of traffic.
• Chris believes Twitter ads are disingenuous.
• They will gradually rank lower in results if they lose 'resonance'.
• TweetUp is a great opportunity. Distributing sponsored tweets. (The founder of TweetUp was responsible for the first search ads.)

Facebook

• 100% year on year growth. Within 18 months will be the largest 'place' where humans 'gather'.
• InsideFacebook.com & AllFacebook.com — Lots of info about what's going on at facebook. Chris thinks InsideFacebook has more reliable stats.

Real Time Search & SEO

• Displacing traditional search results.
• 'Caffeine' update a fundamental overhaul of Google's architecture ("threw away old version").
• New opportunities to gain exposure.
• Things are now indexed far quicker.

Personalization

• Not a lot we (as SEOs) can do about it. Just continue to follow best practices.
• Most people not optimizing non-web page digital assets.

Mobile

• Mobile advertising is the new point of sale.
• 5.8 billion users by 2013.
• Morgan Stanley predict more mobile users than desktop users by 2013.
• Morgan Stanley: Growth of iphone happened at 11 x that of desktop internet.
• No dominant mobile ad network yet.
• Most campaigns are adhoc.
• Great article by Cindy Krum.

Video

• Nothing new

Targeting

• Demographic targeting of ads based on volunteered info supplied when you sign up for an account (e.g. hotmail).
• Behavioral targeting. MS & Yahoo doing it. Chris thinks Google is experimenting with it in Gmail. (Ads based on your online behaviour.)
• Merging online and offline data (e.g. credit card data).
• Opt out: Google Ad Preferences. Personalized Advertising from Microsoft (need a lawyer to interpret!). Ad Interest Manager BETA. NAI consumer opt out across the board.

Conclusion

• Web search will stay consolidated among 3 major players.
• Still seen increased competition = innovation.
• Advertising may DECREASE as search engines continue to refine targeting.

Session 2: Keyword Research: Beyond The Ordinary (Chris Dimmock, Managing Director – Cogentis Search Marketing)

• MS Ad Intelligence for Office 2007 (runs inside Excel). Has keyword extraction tool – extracts keywords from websites.
• Use internal (onsite) search log files can be helpful.
• For a lot of keywords, tools don't help. You have to take an educated guess and cover your bases. e.g. FIFA World cup 2006. The tools don't go back that far, so what to target for 2010.
• Look at competitors (DMOZ, Yahoo Directory).
• Use ranks.nl to id competitors' keywords / ranking.

Session 3: Designing a Bullet Proof Link Building Campaign (Greg Boser, Founder – 3 Dog Media)

• Typical info on competitor analysis to identify where to try to get links, in order to blend in but still dominate.
• Greg hasn't discussed HOW to get links! It's not a bullet-proof campaign if it doesn't cover the HOW, not just the WHICH. He said only contact the webaster and negotiate (sometimes pay).
• Greg hates Vegemite.

Session 4: Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues (Todd Freisen, VP Search – Position Technologies)

• Todd is an ex-black hatter.
• Doesn't like Vegemite.
• Typical info on 301 redirects and canonical link element.

Q&A

• Discussion of 301 v rel canonical didn't touch on downgrade of pagerank thru 301.
• Greg Boser recommends guest blogging over article marketing. Quality articles, either way. I'd be interested to see some data on this. Article marketing DOES work with quality articles.

Session 5: Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues (Danny Dover, SEO Expert – SEOmoz)

• Disabling cookies is necessary to start seeing sites the way Googlebot does, but don't do it globally 'cos that'll make it harder to get back onto Facebook! LOL Use a toolbar.
• Danny is the first person to mention content. The FIRST! At an SEO conference!!!
• Nothing of value in this session. Danny knows his stuff, but his preso was pitched way too low.

Session 6: Avoiding Search Engine Penalties (Brent D Payne – Search Marketing Director, Tribune Interactive)

• Basic stuff on dup content. Nothing advanced (by Brent's own admission).
• Sub-domains on separate IP blocks? Probably not a factor.

Session 7: Dealing With Domain Names, URLs & Parameters (Greg Grothaus, Software Engineer – Google Search Quality Team)

• Basic basic basic. Greg is the man, but this is so basic, it's embarrassing!
• Google updates ranking algo 500+ times a year (and it's increasing).

Q&A

• As long as a Google searcher has the same experience when s/he click through from SERPs as Googlebot does, you're ok (re cloaking).
• Danny Dover: "Yeah, but normal people don't have a Bat-Phone to call up Google…" (Re: different treatmeant by Google of big brand versus small business spam, when Greg Grothaus said there's no different treatment.)
• Greg Grothaus: "I'm pretty sure those affiliate links aren't affecting your ranking… But you should go ahead and no-follow them anyway…" LOL
• If you run an annual event and you want the UPCOMING event to be the one that always ranks (rather than a previous one), use the same URL each year, and simply shift the old event content to a new URL after it's over.
• Danny Dover says his tests show that 90%-99% of PageRank is passed through 301.
• FANTASTIC Q&A!

Session 8: Universal & Blended Search Opportunities (Des O’Dell, Director – Bruce Clay Australia)

• According to Google's Marissa Mayer, in 2007, Universal Search showed for 4% of queries. In 2009, it showed for 25%. But Des's results suggest more prevalent.
• Also Marissa says Google will be continuing to develop it (no surprises there).
• Avg 16 links on each Google results page.
• Minimal changes in Universal Search results from day to day. Links showed most variation. And celeb queries the most variation.
• Landing pages with engagement objects (e.g. movie) are ranking higher than without.
• News, Local, Video, Image, Blog items (in that order) appear most often. Optimize for these.
• To optimize video. Put video first thing on page, below <h1>. Surrounded by on-topic copy and other on page optimization. Also the word "video". Good quality video extremely important. Ensure it's on your sitemap. And of course make it relevant. Make sure page loads fast.
• To optimize images. As above.

Session 9: Ranking Tactics For Local Search (Monte Huebsch – Director, Aussieweb)

• Greg Boser is a "local search spammer" by his own admission.
• Local intent about 60% of the time in Google queries.
• Anecdotal evidence suggests having reviews is important.
• Some (but less) anecdotal evidence suggesting coupons are important.
• Keep it fresh.
• Typical ranking factors of site also signals.
• Google cross references data to see if there's any conflicting info about business.

Session 10: When Google Guidelines and screen reader accessibility collide… (Chris Dimmock, Managing Director – Cogentis Search Marketing)

• Accessibility/Google Clash: Hiding text off screen. Many major sites use CSS to position cntent 'off page' for screen readers (so they comply with the Australian Disability Discrimination Act). Google says if you do this, and your intent is dubious, it's spam. Vast majority of screen reader users have Javascript enabled.
• Google (Greg Grothaus) Response: Use an Alt attribute for images. (Did Greg just call it an Alt "tag"?!!!) If you're straigt out hiding text with CSS, it's spam. Google will most likely get a real person to review it, 'cos it's usually easy for a person to tell if your use is legit or not. NoScript tag obviously doesn't work any more. CSS solution can be ok sometimes. Just make sure that Googlebot and the MAJORITY of visitors see the same thing. Paraphrase: "We want to make sure that people who are developing accessible sites are not penalized. It's in our best interests too." Also the Reconsideration option is there if you are wrongly penalized.
• Title element (NOT page Title attribute)  isn't used by most screen readers because it's invoked by mouse hover!

Q&A

• Question re local search: Monte asked, "Why the hell wouldn't I do it [Google Places]?" I want to rank nationally. My business isn't specific to my local area. Will registering with Google Places undermine my national ranking? Monte's Answer: "No."
• About 20% of Australian searchers search Australian Pages (according to Chris Dimmock).
• Re press releases: Chances of being picked up by Google News are slim unless picked up by an accredited news org.
• Google Icons (an Australian innovation) for brand icons in Google Maps will be rolled out soon to all businesses.

Session 11: The LONG-TABLE (Chris Sherman, Marty Weintrub, Greg Boser, Todd Freisen, Gillian Muesigg, Frederick Vallaeys, Danny Dover)

SEM Tactics that work, hear from our industry experts as they give up a few secrets. "Half an hour to ask as many qustions as you like."

• According to Cindy Krum, ranking results on mobile are much the same as those on desktop. Just a different trigger for universal results. It's a bit "scattered".
• Google at the moment, won't indent related content across sub-domains (unless you display 100 results per page).
• Danny Dover recommends subdirectories (over subdomains) for small to medium sites. So dos Greg Boser.
• Australian shopping comparison sites… Your days are numbered (Greg Boser).
• Local TLD more beneficial than local subdomain (Gillian Muesigg).
• Typical info about building links from local country to local site (international SEO).

Session 12: DRINKS (Me, a Crown, and a couple of hundred fellow search geeks)

<end live blog for the day>

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