Ah, SMX Israel. Marty Weintraub, Michael King and others flying to Israel to join Israel’s top SEOs. I get to go to a great conference without flying anywhere. And great Kosher food. This is the life. Here were the best lines:

Best Lines

Roman Zelvenschi: Nobody knows how to pronounce my last name, but that’s OK, I rank number 1 for it.

Eli Feldblum: Use schema. Do it now. Seriously. You have an internet-connected device with you.

Eli Feldblum: We’ve reached the point where “normal” blue text links get lost in the noise on a Google SERP.

Barry Schwartz: Google is recommending … Doesn’t mean you should do it … Just saying.

Shira Abel: Google owns you. Get used to it.

Marty Weintraub: Facebook owns you too.

Marty Weintraub: Use Facebook to target businesses. Raise your hand if you have a FB account. Raise your hand if you have a job. See …

Tomer Honen (from Google): We got better at Flash. Right about the time people stopped using it

Olivier Amar: When you’re in-house you pay a lot more attention to long term. Because you still want to be here.

Ofer Dascalu: Some people say “publishers and Google are partners.” My partners reply to my e-mails. They pick up the phone when I call.

Michael King: When you interact with people on Twitter don’t use the same account that you use to Tweet SEO articles. That’s like trying to pick up a girl while holding a book called How to Be a Pickup Artist.

Best conference coverage:

• Live Blogging SMX Israel with Kahena Digital
• SMX Israel: You’ve come a long way, baby
• SMX Israel: In Rhyme (interesting niche)

What did I miss? Let me know in the comments or by Tweeting to @GilR or with #BestOf #SMX.

Here are the best lines from other conferences:

• Best of PubCon 2011
• Best of BlogWorld 2011
• Best of SMX East 2011
• Best of WikiMania 2011
• Best of SMX Advanced London 2011
• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

PubCon was great. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines

William Leake:  23% of adults have cursed at their phone after a bad experience with a mobile site. What if they put siri on? What if it curses at us better than we curse at it?

Dan Zarella: All these takeaways are under 140 characters. *wink* just sayin’ (hat tip: Lauren Litwinka)

Ted Ulle: If graphic designers drive the web development process, you are dead, dead, dead! (hat tip: Matt McGlynn)

Roger Dooley: This is a subliminal ad for my book [Large picture of his new neuromarketing book]

Greg Boser: Every year the keynote says SEO is dead. They never come back, but we do. (hat tip: Jonah Stein)

Matt Cutts:

• What is a cell phone? It’s a computer you carry with you everywhere. This will change things enormously. (hat tip: Lauren Litwinka)
• If we can move from an anonymous Web to a Web where reputation matters, that’s going to make the Web better. (hat tip: Lisa Barone)

Tim Ash: Recycle content. What’s the least I can tweak an existing piece to publish as new? [That must be a good thing, it’s green]

Derrick Wheeler: No matter how hard SEO team works, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get implemented.

Rick Skrenta: People ask why do we need another search engine? Don’t we already have one? [Notices co-panelist, Bing's Duane Forrester] Or two?

Best Lessons

Dan Zarella: (Facebook shares)

• There’s a series of words that correlate with a page having less likes – optimization, SEO, consulting, leverage, etc. Even if your brand is marketing optimization – consider more social ways to describe your business (hat tip: Lauren Litwinka)
• Most sharable words: why, how, most, world, big, says. Talk about things in the news, it’s basically gossip (hat tip: Merry Morud)
• Weekends are the best time for FB sharing

Brad Geddes: (Landing pages)

• DO NOT USE SUBMIT BUTTON ON YOUR WEBSITE!!! Use Get This Offer, or Start Your Order, or Continue, or Proceed (hat tip: Dan Richey)
• If you don’t NEED something on your form to convert a customer – REMOVE IT! (hat tip: SEOMike)
• CAPTCHAs just stop conversions. Find another way to fight spam, like hidden edit boxes. [Shows numbers to back this up]
• If somebody gives you a credit card, take it. Don’t reject b/c of dashes or spaces.
• Never ask how did you hear about us. That’s what tracking is for. And the answers people give you are usually wrong.
• Never prefill fields. Our eye is trained to find empty spaces.
• What I or anyone else tells you is a test you should run yourself. Don’t assume that just because we said it it will work for you.

Joanna Lord:

• Don’t just test green button vs blue. Test the bigger things on your site. Don’t assume the guy before you tested them.
• If there are no recognized awards in your industry, create one. Make yourself #6 or something. [Don’t say that. People are going to think just anybody can put up a Best Of post].

Tim Ash:

• Don’t use green or blue call to action buttons. They blend in to the page. Use a good contrasting color like orange. [Was then asked “Why not red?” Answer: Because it makes people think “Stop.”]
• Put a box with the most Tweetable line from your blog and prompt people to Tweet that. Works much better than Tweeting the whole post (and it links to the same thing). (hat tip: Alan K’necht)

Jennifer Cairo: Before you think about social media promotions listen on your channels. Do Twitter searches, find LinkedIn Groups

Chris Winfield: Go to Linked In’s How Journalists Use LinkedIn page and reverse engineer it to figure out how you can get journalists to find you. (hat tip: Lisa Barone, details here: Social Media Press Relations & Brand Management)

Brian Chappel: It’s not all about the tools. Follow Avinash’s 90/10 rule. Spend 10% on the tool, 90% on people to analyze. (hat tip: Lindsay Childs)

Matt Cutts: Google will be integrating algos that consider what’s above the fold, what a user sees in the first 500 milliseconds. Do people see content or something that’s distracting?

Marty Weintraub: People think Facebook is for personal and LinkedIn is for business. Wrong! There are great business opportunities on Facebook.

Greg Boser:

• Brute force is dead regarding backlinks. It’s too hard now to fake a natural footprint well enough to fool Google.
• Human Engagement is the new Page Rank. Build engagement signals, get links from pages w/ good engagement signals.

Best Jump the Couch Moment

In an otherwise strong opening keynote, Leo Laporte said he’s not sure search engines will still be relevant in 5 months. Really?

Best Exchanges

Tim Ash shows eye tracking results of a page with a picture of a woman and some text and buttons.

Audience member: Those results are bullshit. The user didn’t look at the woman’s breasts.

Tim Ash: It’s not bullshit, the user was a woman.

Question: If I do doorway pages will the whole site get penalized or just the doorway pages?

Matt Cutts: Are you asking me how to most effectively build doorway pages?!

Question: I have to …

Matt: Oh, somebody kidnapped your family and is demanding that you create doorway pages? OK, I sympathize. But tell the kidnapper that these pages don’t work anymore. They won’t help him.

Amit Singhal: Don’t do it, man. Don’t do it.

[2 questions later]

Danny Sullivan: I have my doorway pages on Blogger …

Best Anecdotes

Greg Boser was drunk the night before WebExpo 2.0 and hadn’t put together a deck, so he went online and took one from Stephan Spencer. Stephan was at the session. Oops.

Matt Cutts had to take a break from live interaction sessions because the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu wanted to borrow the PC he used for those sessions. Matt figured it was good karma and his computer would come back much nicer and calmer. [Maybe it came back as a Mac].

Best Theatrics

• Ziv Dascalu puts on black ski mask to discuss black hat techniques. [Which he says not to use. He’s only teaching you so that you can defend yourself. He’s like a defense against the dark arts teacher].
• Matt Cutts was asked his favorite Tweet from PubCon. He said this one from @maplenorth (Adam Green): @leolaporte - “I don’t know if search engines are relevant in 6 months” … Somewhere @mattcutts just spit out his morning coffee #pubcon. So Matt recreates the moment by drinking some water and doing a spit take.

Best Session Title

• Rob Garner: e-commerce SEO is Dead (and I don’t feel so good myself) (hat tip: Michelle Lowery)

Best Lines from Blog Coverage

• Ryan Jones: Next up is Greg Boser and the room is shocked that he not only has a powerpoint deck, but he also didn’t steal it! Way to go Greg!
• Lisa Barone: Leo [Laporte] asks what we tell our parents what we do for a living. …  My dad tells people I’m a secretary for Google. Which…I mean…he has a point, right?

Best Tweets

• @chrisgoulet: via @WarrenWhitlock at #pubcon - Make sure your messages fit into the length of a tweet, or people will be unab
• @BigKitchen: Twitter makes me want to have drinks w/ ppl I’ve never met & FB makes me want to throw drinks at people I know
• @lindsaylorraine: You know you’re tweeting too much when hubby stops following you.
• @mattcutts: I still can’t believe someone at #pubcon asked me the best way to do doorway pages. Amit’s take: “Don’t do that.” :)

Best Coverage:

• Outspoken Media: Pubcon 2011
• SERoundTable: PubCon 2011 Las Vegas Conference
• Search Engine Journal: PUBCON 2011

BlogWorld was awesome. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines

Amber Naslund:

• There are these big changes going on in how people interact, and we’re in charge. Are your parents scared? They should be.
• Our top fear isn’t failure, it’s being blamed.
• … they’d stone me to death. And not in the good way.

Mari Smith: I’m a raging extrovert. I often don’t know what I’m thinking until after I say it.

Debba Haupert : If you haven’t failed in Social Media, you haven’t tried Social Media. Start conversations, see what gets people to talk.

Darren Rowse:

• When people come up to me to mention a blog post that they remember, it’s never a post about shutter speed. It’s always a story that I told.
• Sometimes you can inspire people first and then inform them. I posted a slide show of inspirational pictures, and then a link to a tutorial about techniques. People clicked those links like crazy.

Peter Shankman:

• I have not only ADHD but also ADOS. ADOS is Attention Deficit [gets distracted and points to imaginary object] Oh, Shiny.
• To let you know how good I am at Iron Man the really top people are sponsored by great health-oriented brands. I’m sponsored by candy companies.
• Ed Meese said MTV is killing America because it’s cutting their attention span to 3 minutes. Today I’d kill for an audience with a 3 minute attention span. Average attention span today is 2.6 to 3 seconds. Roughly 140 characters.

Guy Kawasaki:

• I only have 2 modes on social. Off or on. If I have something to share, I put it out to 275,000 of my closest friends. [Back in 1999 Guy liked our product, GuruNet, and said he’d send out an e-mail to his “5,000 closest friends.” We laughed about him having such a large following. The number 275,000 today surprises us a lot less than 5,000 did 12 years. And that, in a nutshell, is the Social Media revolution.]
• I’m amazed that people are so skeptical about Google +. Especially the tech media, who are always saying things like “Sergey hasn’t posted a message in 36 minutes. They must have given up on Google +.”

Best Introductions:

• “Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan, two people who need no introduction.” Then she walked away. [Sadly the introducer also received no introduction so I don't have her name. If you have it, please let me know.]
• “Without further ado I’d like to introduce Mari Smith. Woo hoo!” [Mari Smith, introducing herself]

Best Anecdotes:

• Peter Shankman: I had 40 straight flights where I sat next to people who weighed 400 pounds or never showered. Then I sat next to Miss Texas. It was obviously her turn to have a shitty flight.
• Chris Brogan: When I was a teenager I saw Guy [Kawasaki] when he was evangelizing for the Mac. I told my dad “that’s what I want to do when I grow up.” Dad said “that’s the dumbest job idea I ever heard.”

Best Personal Touch:

• Lisa Barone: I think of myself as a corporate blog voice-giver. That’s my passion, giving corporate blogs a voice. As you probably know by now, I stutter. The fact that I stutter probably means that I understand the power of voice more than anyone else. I know what it’s like not to have one, I know what it’s like to have it taken away, I know what it’s like to have something to say and no way to say it, and I know what it’s like to get your voice back.
• Peter Shankman: Ends keynote by saying that if you’re doing it right, doing great work and living a great life are one and the same. And make sure to remember to live your life. Then shows a picture of himself proposing and announces his engagement.

Best Stats:

Best Running Gag:

Peter Shankman often stopping to translate for the under-30 crowd:

• Radio – that’s like Pandora before the internet
• Books – that’s like a Kindle that doesn’t use batteries
• Rolodex – that’s like Outlook but with cards

SMX East was awesome. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines

• Jeff Jarvis: Google is portrayed as Godzilla but sees itself as Snufflupagus (hat tip: Lisa Barone)
  
• Marty Weintraub: Make your Facebook ads fun! “Lost your head”? “Goodbye stupid tools”, or “Don’t be a dumb__clockhead” ..”Facebook won’t let you say ass (hat tip: Akvile Harlow)
• Danny Sullivan:
• It’s Google’s world. We just rank in it. Or not.
• Originally Google Plus was called The Google Plus until Justin Timberlake advised them to drop the “The.”
• Michael Gray:
• In Social Media you’re either the con or the mark. If you don’t know which one you are … (hat tip: Will Scott)
• Be a valuable member of the community. Don’t only submit your own stuff. If you’re a con, look like a mark (hat tip: Akvile Harlow)
• Matt Heist: We did our Green Cars site in blue. People ridiculed us for it. Shows what you don’t notice when you’re thinking in metaphors.
• Jack Menzel (Google Product Manager talking about personalization): We’ve made your jobs easier. You don’t have to figure out how to rank globally if you’re not globally relevant.
• Duane Forrester: Check out the Bing Webmaster Blog. I publish there every week. Last week we published our algorithm so check it out.
• Kevin Lee: Retargeted ads can be creepy. If I go to my wife’s computer and see ads for a divorce lawyer, I’d be creeped out.
• Rae Hoffman-Dolan: I do a little bit of consulting. Not too much because I don’t like clients.

Best Tips

• Erika Mamber: Don’t hire SEO copywriters. Hire really good writers & train them in SEO.
• Ulli Muenker: When seeking allies in an organization, tell people that knowing SEO can help them land their next job.
• Duane Forrester: Just posted great timely content that needs to rank now? Bing Webmaster Central now has a Submit URL feature that will get it indexed immediately.
• Marty Weintraub’s social media advice: The best way to make friends is to be friendly. The best way to get likes is to do things that make people like you. (hat tip: @Lerna & @AmyVernon)
• Shari Thurow’s GUI tip: Do not put prompt text in search boxes. Usability tests show eyes go right to empty boxes. (hat tip: Rich Kelley)

Best (worst?) Mistakes

• Simon Heseltine: Told Client X to implement canonical URLs like Site Y did. So they copied the canonical tag exactly, including Site Y’s URL. Oops.
• Bruce Clay: A site implemented a 404 page by copying the homepage, and then putting a canonical URL on the 404 to the homepage.

Best Exchanges

• Question: What if different departments in a company are both competing for ranking on the same search term?
• Barbara Coll: Let them duke it out.
• Chris Sherman: What if they start spamming each other?

Best Concepts

• G-Bounce: For most Analytics programs a Bounce is simply a visit where the user views just a single page. The correlation between bounces and user satisfaction can be murky. Mark Munroe used the term G-Bounce to refer to people who do a Google search, click on your site, come back quickly, and click on other results. Danny Sullivan later referred to this as PogoSticking. Especially with Panda, sites need to focus on lowering their G-Bounce rates. Figure out which pages and search terms have high G-Bounce rates. They may be sabotaging your whole site. And if you can’t satisfy your user, direct him to another site that can. Just don’t let him G-Bounce.
• In-House SEO is mostly about culture. Most of the in-house people painted a picture of a sole in-house SEO working in a large company. Be nice, make friends, and gather SEO evangelists.
• Google is getting a lot fuzzier. Not in the warm and cuddly way. Their attitude in the past was far more binary. A page either had a big penalty or it didn’t. When asked if they used particular signals Matt Cutts would often say “no, that’s too spammable.” Now they just take everything and use it as either a primary or corroborating signal, incorporate it into a ranking factor. OT1H, this means they’ll make a lot more mistakes, and they can be more easily gamed. OTOH, the mistakes should be much smaller and it may be much harder to game them in an economically viable manner.
• Google & Bing see themselves as the user’s friend in a conversation: Eli Pariser gave an entertaining keynote about the dangers of how much Google knows about you and how they use that to determine what results to show you. Google Product Manager Jack Menzel countered with “I’m so excited that our personalization works so well that people are creating dystopian fantasies about it.” He asked things like “How stupid would your friend think you are if he asked for the bus schedule and you gave him schedules for far-away cities? How annoyed would you be at your friend if he wasn’t paying attention to you so he answered your question without considering the previous parts of your conversation?” Google Plus Product Manager Christian Oestlein said that Google Plus isn’t Google’s attempt to build a third or fourth social network. It’s the centerpiece of their attempt to understand their users better so they can better serve throughout the product line. Jeff Jarvis’ line from the first session of SMX East really nailed it. There’s no disagreement on the facts of what Google is doing. But Google’s critics see an evil monster; Google sees itself as a lovable friend.
• Is Black Hat SEO Dying?:  I think this is the first “Ask the SEOs” session with a majority of White Hats. A far greater percentage of tips at this conference have been snow white, about understanding and satisfying your market, improving your analytics, etc. Search has grown a lot in the past few years. Or the black hats have gone further underground and are making millions out of the spotlight.

Best Tweets

• @Hyph_en: Is your demographic seniors? How to get them to +1? Make the buttons bigger! lol…or just offer free Snickers bars
• @simonheseltine: When the red light is flashing you’re not almost out of time. You’re out of time.
• @dannysullivan: Irony. Wifi always works enough for people to tweet it’s not working, but never good enough to prevent “wifi’s not working” tweets :)
• @byrneseyeview: ”Maybe. I’m symathetic. It’s complicated. Can’t tell you.” I will never play poker with a Google rep.
• @rpmkel (during a session about creepy retargeted ads): What’s ironic is that the most seen retargeted ad everyone attending #SMX has seen was one for SMX East

Best Launch

• Following a cool pagination smackdown at SMX West, Maile Ohye showed up at SMX East to announce the launch of Google’s solution for the paginated article problem. Audience consensus was that the feature is a winner. See Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

Best Tweeting

• @beebow. AimClear’s Laura Litwinka’s Tweets always made me wish I had chosen the same session she did. And when we were in the same session I often wished I had her perspective.

Best LiveBlogging

Danny challenged Lisa to a Blog-Off as the conference started. But he got a little distracted with the moderating and a running a conference and all. So the best SMX East coverage came from Lisa Barone, Barry Schwartz and Laura Litwinka.

What did I miss? Let me know in the comments or by Tweeting to @GilR.

If you enjoyed this, also see:

• Best of WikiMania 2011
• Best of SMX Advanced London 2011
• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

I was thrilled that WikiMania made it to Haifa. It was a great conference. Here was the best of the best:

Best Lines

• Jimmy Wales:
• We need to recapture the spirit of innovation (in software) and not have a massive debate for each change. (hat tip: @Wittylama)
• Wikipedia cares about quality. Many articles the average person is no longer qualified to edit. This isn’t a bad thing. (hat tip: @HstryQT)
• Game Mechanics is what you add when you don’t have a product people want to use. If you want a game, play Farmville
• Steven Walling: Snuggle, Don’t Huggle (Huggle is one of several bots that sends messages to contributors informing them of the errors of their ways. Users are more likely to stay when greeted by humans, not rebuked by bots)
• Sue Gardner (quoting a French journalist): Insulting Wikipedia is so 2007
• Dr. Yochai Benkler:
• ProSocial doesn’t always mean nice. Can be against another group. Need to channel to positive avenues. Like soccer.
• Wikipedia is not a puzzle. It is who we are. The puzzle is how we believed the non-prosocial view of humanity for so long.
• Are we really altruistic if we get a kick from helping others. Who cares?
• Framing matters. They ran 2 Prisoner’s Dilemma games. One got 70% open & sustained cooperation, the other only 30%. The only difference? They called one game “The Community Game” and the other “The Wall Street Game.”
• Dr. Sagy Refaeli: I thank the Internet association for handing out notebooks. Interesting for Internet association to hand out dead wood.
• Brion Vibber: What is the parser? The parser is the very scary part of the code (hat tip: @grammarware)
• Brandon Harris:
• There is a style guide. Anyone can edit it. Then I’ll revert it. (hat tip: @RenaR)
• We added the Article Feedback to give users a lower bar to start contributing to Wikipedia. We found that once you start contributing to Wikipedia, you can’t stop. Like a big bag of Pringles. Maybe if we can just get you to click a star you’ll then edit. (Howie Fung then added: The Edit button is too high a bar for first contribution)
•  Identity + Conversation = Community (hat tip: @grammarware)
• Lennart Guldbrandsson:
• In our survey asking people why they created an account the best reason given was “Dunno. I was bored.” [Many of the answers show that people created accounts not because they wanted to edit; they joined because they wanted to be a part of Wikipedia]
• Some Wikipedians really hated some of the changes I wanted to make. Luckily I was on a fellowship. If I were just an Admin, I’d have been banned.
• Lori Phillips:
• We ask museums “You have a volunteer program, but do you have an e-volunteer program.” When they say no we say “Actually, you do. You’re just not affiliated with it yet.” Then they ask to learn more about us.
• We put QR codes to our articles near the items. We’ve seen this work. The dads do it a lot.
• Dr. Joseph Reagle: [After quoting a critic who years ago compared Wikipedia to a public toilet.] I have the History and Discussion tabs so I know who pissed in Wikipedia. I don’t know who pissed in Britannica.
• Liam Wyatt: (hat tip: Lori Phillips)
• If we can’t get on the World Heritage list because we’re not a country, but because we’re the WORLD, then that’s their problem.
• It’s not about getting on the list. It starts a conversation about what cultural heritage means in the digital age.
• This is actually a little bit about hacking UNESCO. We’re not going to change our policies, and if your rules say we need to be fixed, then we don’t want to be on your list. If they said we can’t be on the list because we’re digital, that would spark an interesting conversation.

Best Tweets

Satire & Irony

• @theiapsswalker: Someone started snoring loudly during presentation about copyright
• @grammarware: If intellectual property is immaterial, why is it called ‘property’?
• @israelconnect: Sue Gardner just asked everyone to find someone they don’t know & speak 2 them. It was too successful.
• @emijrp: For the sake of gender equality, we want to raise the share of female vandalism to 45% by 2020. (hat tip: @darkonek0)
• @andrewlih: Overheard – I like five year plans, but Stalin pretty much poisoned the well.
• @wittylama: Presenting @ #Wikimania on the venue’s laptop, @kaldari says “it’s not working… Does anyone here know how to use Windows?” Silence
• @HistoryQT: @Wittylama It’s my first Jimmy talk experience, and I’m thoroughly enjoying myself. (I could also just whisper this to you. Oh well.) [But then we couldn't capture it for posterity ...]

Deep Thoughts

• @davidrichfield:  Best concept from Global South discussions at #wikimania – The sum of human knowledge greatly exceeds the sum of published knowledge.
• @b1mbo: If your students send a copy-pasted text from an encyclopedia, maybe you asked wrong.
• @thekulway: Every person has some kind of Conflict of Interest but that doesn’t mean you can’t edit Wikipedia. Disclose & be thoughtful
• @grammarware: Not really a revelation, but testing by MediaWiki developers is done in an extremely ad hoc manner.
• @chaoticfluffy: Wikimania realization of the day: what watering holes are to African wildlife, power strips are to geeks.
• @bevellin: Stephen Colbert : “Wikialty : reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you : it becomes reality”

Shabbat

• @thekulway: I’m experiencing my first Shabbat in Israel so there was no toaster. I had to heat my bread in my armpit this morning [and then he followed that with ...]
• @thekulway: When we all become cyborgs what are Jewish folks gonna do when they have to recharge on the Shabbat? Wikipedia article anyone?

Slide Preparations

• @effeietsanders: The slides for my talk are ready, I just need to fill them with text (hat tip: @grammarware)
• @chaoticfluffy: Got nearly all of my #wikimania presentation written on the flight from Newark to London. Now..how do I amuse myself on the way to Tel Aviv?

Policy Issues

• @harej: A Wikipedia article being cited in a court decision has been proposed for deletion.
• @grammarware: Brandon Harris approves multiple identities, because in a working community identity is a role you play.
• @fuzheado: You know the articles that suffer the worst Conflict Of Interest in Wikipedia? Articles about universities and colleges. They are always glowing
• @grammarware: A great comment from the back: COI guidelines need complete overhaul. Sometimes “conflict” makes you more knowledgable.
• @harej: Policy recommendation: let editors with COI editing in good faith disclose their conflict so we can help them.

[I'm somewhat obsessed with issues of identity & self-interest vs anonymity & selflessness: See Enlightened Self-Interest and the Social Web, On the Internet Everyone Knows You're a Dog, and The Age of Anonymity has Ended]

Best Stats

• Howie Fung:
• Huge growth in Wikipedia active editors through 2007. Then slight decline. All languages show similar pattern.
• New Wikipedians falling about 11% Year Over Year. And the ones that are joining are leaving at a much higher rate.
• About 20% annual attrition of dedicated editors, so that’s not where we’re having a problem.
• Wikipedia editors (who answered our survey) are:
• 91% male (worse than we thought)
• 28% married. 24% with children.
• 52% working full or part time.
• Not as young as we thought. Mean age 31. Median age 28.
• 36% programmers.
• Half of 2010 bytes were contributed from people who joined in 2009-2010.
• Steven Walling:
  • By end of 2010, new Wikipedians (2009-2010 join date) contribute 50% of main Wikipedia edits (Hat tip: @fuzheado)
  • 30% of first edits of today’s dedicated editors were reverted
  • Each day on Wikipedia (all language versions combined) 500 million page views, 400,000 edits (hat tip: @r)
  • 21% of Wikipedia editors are doing edits anonymously (hat tip: @anoopan)
  • More great stats at
    • stats.wikipedia.org
    • Editor survey discussion at #wikimania. Top-line data: http://ur1.ca/4haw2 Blog posts: http://bit.ly/rrFiIU (Hat tip: @xirzon)

Note: Due to a bug in my note-taking, some of the attributions for stats may be incorrect. Sorry that this isn’t a wiki. Please correct me in the comments.

Best Audience Interaction

• Sue Gardner: Mentions upcoming Visual Editor. Gets applause. “The louder you clap the harder Brion will code.” Gets very loud applause.
• Sue (this time in the audience): How are Arabic & Hindi communities using #wikilove differently? Brandon: The cheeseburger icon isn’t used. We had the same thing with Hebrew. (Turns out they’re using a cookie for Hebrew). (hat tip: @HstryQT)

Best Irony

• The time for “What place for companies on Wikipedia” was mostly used by other sessions, and was therefore presented briefly and at lightning speed. Maybe that answers the question. [Though quick, I thought the presentation was compelling, but that may be my bias that Wikimedia should be more open to partnerships with companies]

Best Prank

• Speaker creates a Wikipedia page and uses it during his presentation. Suddenly the page is marked for deletion by a conference attendee. Reason: “Used in boring talk.” (hat tip: @mSefi)

What did I miss? Please nominate best-of’s by commenting below.

If you enjoyed this, also see:

• Best of SMX Advanced London 2011
• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

Here are the best link building tips I’ve heard and read:

Writing Content That Attracts Links

• Lists:
• 10 easy tips for …
• Top 10 myths about …
• Top [category] Experts (Aaron Wall & Andy Hagans, 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity)
• (But don’t do Best Of. That’s my thing :-) ).
• Ego-Stroking:
• Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. (Google [your industry + "in the news"].) (Aaron & Andy)
• Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got great links. (Aaron & Andy)
• Industry Guides: (Dawn Wentzell)
• If there’s no good guide for your industry, create it. Keep it updated.
• If you’ve done a series of posts on a topic, compile them together. If it’s a valuable resource, your users will promote it for you for years.
• How to’s and tutorials

Asking for Links

• Incentivize:
• Forget about going viral. Think about who you need links from, and give them things that are useful to them:  (Patrick Altoft)
• Awards for top bloggers in your sector. And give prizes.
• Pick up the phone and ask the site owner “what can we do for you?”
• “Buying” links can be bad, but sponsorships, donations, and memberships with relevant sites can be good.
• Ego Stroking:
• Write testimonials
• Give out badges

• Ask for a link in all your communications: confirmation e-mails, newsletters, e-mail signatures …) (Rand Fishkin: Headsmacking Tip #1: Link requests in order confirmation e-mails)
• Follow Lisa’s 7 rules for asking for the link:
1. Be personal
2. Script lightly
3. Be brief
4. Remove buzzwords
5. Be upfront
6. Tell me what you want
7. Don’t make e-mail your first point of contact

Creating Your Own Links

Bonus Tip:

• Whenever you see a dead link that your link could naturally replace, find all the sites that link to that URL and ask for the link. You’re serving them, and you. (Hobo Web: Backlinks from Deadlinks)

Sources & Further Reading:

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• 7 Tips for Better Link Pitches
• Link Building with the Experts – 2011 Edition
• Headsmacking Tip #1: Link requests in order confirmation e-mails
• Backlinks from Deadlinks
• Link Building Strategies and Ranking Tactics (SMX Toronto)
• Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold (SMX Advanced London)
• Get People to Put Your Message on Their Site

Thanx to great Tweets, blog posts, and the incomparable Lisa Barone’s SMX coverage, here’s the Best of SMX Advanced 2011:

Panda

• Matt Cutts:
  • There’s a change coming related to scrapers outranking people for their own content that will be released soon.
  • Panda is a site-based signal that will affect you based on where we think you sit on the spectrum. If we think your site is really, really good, you can still rank.
• Mark Munroe:
  • It was a site-wide hit. There’s no correlation to page and content, almost everything is pushed down with normal fluctuations.
  • Panda is an admission by Google that they can’t identify the quality of an individual piece of content. If they could, they would and you would not have site-wide panda hits. [This fits with Eric Schmidt’s comment that “brands are the solution.” Google has always been about valuing a page according to the network that page is in. IMO Panda includes a logical next step of judging a page not by quality of the pages that link to it, but by the quality of the other pages in that subdomain].
  • Some tips to minimize the number of people that bounce back to Google and choose a different site from the same search:
    • Check which keywords get people to each page, and make sure you’re answering the needs of that searcher
    • Link out to relevant content.
    • Don’t overdo the annoying ads
• @mattgratt: Prior to Panda, content was spam or not. After Panda, content was in shades of grey. (hat tip: Danny Sullivan)

Link-building ideas:

• Ross Hudgens: [For sites trying to rank well in a specific physical location]
  • Court local influencers by inviting them to your office for a personal tour
  • Take a group out for lunch or coffee to discuss issues which effect them
  • Host a philanthropic event and contact regional bloggers to help you promote it
• Conrad Saam: Help journalists break stories about your industry or your company:
  • Create stories from your own data, like Trip Advisor does with their annual “Dirtiest Hotels.”
  • Write the story for the journalist.
  • Giving a journalist an exclusive, giving him or her full and exclusive access to you.
• Eric Enge:
  • Gave SEO training seminar to government webmasters, got lots of links from USA.gov (and they paid costs and speaking fee)
  • Contacted Boston.com and Washington Post, asserted that they had authority (sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t) and got links or article placements.

Best Exchange:

• Danny Sullivan: What tweaks are you making [to Panda]?
• Matt Cutts: It’s in my head
• Danny: Well, then let’s hope nothing happens to you before you get back to Google

Best Tweet:

• @beebow (Lauren Litwinka): Q: most effective tactic for getting more reviews? A: ask for them. unless you suck. -@w2scott #smx

Conference Controversy:

• Does Google use Facebook shares? Rand Fishkin implies yes. Matt Cutts says no. Danny Sullivan says Rand only said there’s correlation, not causation. Rand says no, Matt may not realize this, but Google is definitely directly or indirectly reading Facebook’s OpenGraph. See their Twitter streams (@randfish, @dannysullivan) for more details.

Final Takeaways:

• [For conference speakers] Bribe Lisa Barone with chocolate for better coverage (thank you Alan Bleiweiss)
• I wish I were there. Thank you speakers, Tweeters, and Lisa Barone for the great content. Lisa, I owe you a chocolate.

What did I miss? Let me know!

Also in this series:

• Best of SMX Advanced London 2011
• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

SMX London was great. Here’s the best of the best.

Best Lines & Lessons

• David Burgess: [For Extreme Makeover SEO Edition had to get a site from unranked to page 1 in 3 months]: I was told if I couldn’t get the site ranking #1 I’d be sacked. So this is his first and last conference presentation.
• Stephen Pavlovich: We’re not trying to win awards, we’re trying to drive conversions
• John Mueller: Google may crawl internal site search with relevant keywords to find content which isn’t indexed (hat tip: Kevin Gibbons)
• Kelvin Newman: Think about what survey or poll results would people write about and go for it. (hat tip: @DavidCarralon)
• Christine Churchill:
  • Broad match used to be great, but Google kept expanding it and now it’s too broad. Modified broad match is you can put plusses in front of the words. +apple +pie your ad will only show up if it has both words with plusses in front of it.
  • Pay attention to what shows up in Google Instant and Google Suggests when people are typing their search queries.
• Craig Danuloff: In paid search, the amount you pay for a click isn’t directly based on your bid. Your ranking is affected by it, but your payment is determined by the ad behind you and your quality score.
• Max Thomas: Last link building tip: Have Fun! Great content rocks.
• Michael Wyszomierski (from Google): [Regarding reconsideration requests] In most cases there is no penalty, it’s some other issue. That’s why we’re sending those messages now [saying there's no penalty].
• [Answering: What do you do when a company says "we know we have this problem on our site but we don't have the resources to fix it?]
  • Mikkel deMib Svendsen: It’s like a grocery store saying “we know we have bad food that’s old and rotten but we don’t have the time to throw it out.” Sorry. Building a website takes a lot of time.
  • Craig McDonald: The only thing I’ve seen that works is to bring in a 3rd party SEO expert, sometimes they’ll be able to convince where you can’t.
• [Multiple speakers:] More and more sites are getting hacked. Protect your sites! If you’re using WordPress make sure you’re always on the latest version.
• Patrick Altoft [on link building]: Going viral is great. But most people are better off focusing on who they need and giving things that are useful to them.

Best (actually, Worst) Mistakes

• Mikkel deMib Svendsen:
  • Site hosted by RackSpace, suddenly dropped out of search. RackSpace decided that the engines were taking up too much bandwidth so they blocked them all.
  • An engineer redirected all users who didn’t support javascript to a page saying “please install JavaScript.”
• Richard Baxter: Client wondered why they weren’t ranking in Bing. Turns out they’d been blocking the MSNBot for years because it was once overly aggressive.
• Jonathan Hochman: robots.txt file on testing server was blocking spiders. Accidentally moved that file over to the live servers, thus blocking their live site. [Find some other solution to keep spiders off your testing servers. Nothing that could accidentally move over].

Best Stats

• Greg Sterling: Google site links increase CTRs by 3X
• Daniel Ruby: #1 result on Google appears on Bing page 1 67% of time. Page 1 Google results show on Bing’s first page 43% time (hat tip: @wordtracker)
• David Burgess: 50% improvement using the charity’s email address versus a generic email for link building (hat tip: @keyrelevance)

Best Tweets

• maxormark: Another “missing” speaker. “A broken ankle” Didn’t know SEO was so dangerous

Best Coverage

• WordTracker’s Gareth Davies: SMX London: 221 Takeaways
• State of Search: SMX London
• Koozai’s Sam Stratton: SMX London Day 1 and Day 2

Got more? Help me out by Tweeting me at @GilR with more nominations (and corrections). Thanx!

Other coverage from SMX London:

For more in the series, see:

• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

SMX Toronto was excellent. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines & Lessons

• Bruce Clay: In the future we’re going to have to analyze the analytics and not just report it (hat tip: @saffyre9)
• Dawn Wentzell:
  • If you’re looking to convince your CEO not to use Flash, just tell him it won’t work on his iPad.
  • If it’s hard to get links in your industry, find something tangentially related.
• Lyndsay Walker: If you have a small site or a few key pages, manually get rid of extra code that the template puts in.
• Christine Churchill:
  • Click tracking can tell you what people are doing. To find out why you need to do live user testing.
  • As an SEO consultant the people whose design you’re criticizing are probably the ones that hired you. So diplomacy is important.
• Alan K’necht: Agencies like Flash because they can charge a higher markup for it.
• Chris Sherman:
  • The Steve Jobs reality distortion device: “People aren’t searching on mobile.” Yes, they are.
  • Google says Panda only affected about 10-12% of the sites. Well, that’s more than 100 million websites.
  • Google’s efficiency with search saves us about 350 million hours per year (hat tip: @jason_faber)
  • Google Instant impacting user behavior. People are scanning. Page titles now matter a lot more. (hat tip: @aknecht)
• Kate Morris: Often ignored truth: Getting Facebook and Twitter friends and fans is the 1st step. Then you need to converse with them.
• Lyndsay Walker & Alan K’necht: When you interview designers, ask them what they do about SEO. If they hem & haw, or talk about keyword meta-tags, run the other way.
• Ken Dobell:
  • People are getting better at search
  • Average search query is growing in length
  • 50% of searches are >3 words
  • Only 1/3 of them get back an exact match
  • What jumps off the page is what best mirrors what I typed
  • 3 parts: Appear, appear relevant, be relevant
  • Local is up 54% Year over Year
• Mitch Joel:
  • How are you? [No response] I’m here, I’m not on YouTube, you can interact.
  • Putting somebody in charge of Digital Marketing because they’re on Facebook is like making me an electrician because I turn on a light.
  • This is all my contact information. [Shows Google home page]
  • (Quoting Chris Anderson) Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is. And Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Most people aren’t where they should be right now. I’m not a futurist, I’m a presentist.

Best Perspectives

• Bruce Clay:
  • First brands said we don’t need SEO
  • Then they said OK, give me SEO but don’t change my site
  • Then they said OK, you can change the page title, because that’s what SEO is

Best Tweets:

• @glinskiii: Idea of the conference – “The Daily Data Dump” – a one-pager for the executive bathroom. (hat tip: @GScottTweets)
• @anilopez:
  • say hello when you enter an elevator should be a social media ranking factor for Google Canada
  • keywords ranking reports are like royal families, at some point you have to bring back the guillotine to work hard
• @fmorello: Very True! Hi Mike, I’m Frank “@MikeOtt: I have done more networking through twitter than I have in person during #smx”

Best Anecdote:

• Mitch Joel: His 3 year old complained that their 50″ LCD TV was broken because it wasn’t responding to his attempts to move elements off the screen so he could play Angry Birds.

Best Recaps:

• Jackson Lo: Highlights from SMX Toronto Day 1

Got more? Help me out by Tweeting me at @GilR with more nominations (and corrections). Thanx!

For more in the series, see:

• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

South by Southwest is a remarkable conference. The Interactive segment alone was nearly 5 crazy days with about 40 simultaneous sessions in each time slot. It included lectures by industry luminaries, celebrities, entrepreneurs and “ordinary” people with interesting ideas and perspectives to share. Here’s the best from the 2011 conference.

Best Lines:

• Guy Kawasaki:
  • The Apple group was probably the largest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California. Which is saying something.
  • I believe in G-d because that’s the only explanation for Apple’s continued existence.
  • A good speaker avoids going off-track. A great speaker can go off-track and come back. So let me show you this …
  • Your presentation should be 10 slides. Now you may say Guy, you had more. Well, you’re not me.
• Gary Vaynerchuck:
  • I needed to build an organization because I don’t scale. Me, and the Beebs, and Gaga, we can’t scale.
  • I love you because I view you as an end user, not because I’m Mother f-ing Theresa.
• Jared Spool:
  • How many of you hate raising their hands in little surveys? OK, that’s our margin of error.
  • This isn’t rocket science. We know because NASA is one of our clients and we asked them what rocket science is and they said this is not it. So we thought brain surgery. We went to the NIH and it’s not that either. We’re now thinking pool cleaning. But with robots.
• Barry Diller:
  • [About bubbles] All the money lost is lost by people who can afford to lose it, so who cares?
  • Sumner Redstone invented the Content is King thing. Because he had content. And he wanted to be king.
• Senator Al Franken:
  • Some of you may not be aware that I used to be in comedy (used to be?)
  • My opponents, using a rhetorical technique called “making things up” (love ‘em or hate ‘em, he is funny)
• Patrick O’Keefe: Thanks for coming to hear 27 fun ways to kill your community. Clever title, right? It was meant to get you to this session. It worked! But this session is really about something else entirely.
• Matt Mullenweg(WordPress):
  • I take out my camera and take pictures of my food. It’s rude, but I tell people I’m blogging, it’s my thing.
  • Tumbler is great for pictures. Some say it’s porn, but I think it’s artistic.
• Thomas Myer:
  • How many designers in the room? Cool. Can you help me on my site
  • We make fun of @katebuckjr‘s stuff because it’s so salesy. But she can’t hear us over her Ferrari
• Reid Hoffman: When people predicted the future they expected things like flying cars. I flew here on a plane courtesy of the Wright Brothers. With service courtesy of Darth Vader.
• Steve Krug: I’ll usability test the SXSW schedule. The technical term for this is “biting the hand that feeds you.”
• Chris Guillebeau: This session is called Fear and the Art of Creation, so I don’t mind telling you, I’m terrified.
• Phoebe Ayers: For everybody in the 7th grade now, Wikipedia has always existed.
• Lora Kolodny: Content marketing is like sex in high school: everyone says they’re doing it but many aren’t, and those who do stink at it.

Best Exchanges:

• Bing’s Duane Forrester: You don’t need ranking reports
• Questioner: But my boss insists that we do
• Duane: Tell him to Tweet me. I’ll set him straight. I got your back.

• Questioner: You said at the beginning of the session that you’re trying to cut down on your profanity.
• Gary Vaynerchuck: How’d I do?
• Questioner: 21 F- yous, 37 assholes, 7 shitheads, and one dickface
• [Laughter]
• Gary: So I’m getting better.

• Barry Diller: [asked about doing a publications for the iPad] I don’t know why you’d do a specific project for any device
• Poppy Harlow: Apple likes it
• Barry: Apple likes it when you pay them

• Barry: [on net neutrality] We need a law that noone can step between the Publishers and the Consumers
• Poppy: Do you think this would be the end of entrepreneurship as we know it? (as Senator Franken implied in the previous session)
• Barry: No, I don’t think anything would be the end of entrepreneurship as we know it. Except in Libya if they kill all the entrepreneurs.
• Poppy: Point taken.

Best Stats:

• Philip Neustrom: Every day 1 in 6 residents of Davis, California visits the community wiki. Every month, nearly everyone in Davis. 1 in 7 residents contribute.
• Matt Mullenweg: WordPress.org blogs went up 3% after Google’s Panda update

Best Tweets:

• @MktgValerie: #sxsw pick-up line: what’s your hashtag?
• @GreeterDan: I hate to tell you this, but he’s fictional. Maybe time to stop drinking? ;-) RT @joshuanguyen: I just spoke to Don Draper OMFG
• @cornfed2: I just unlocked the ‘I’m getting old so I can’t walk around #SXSW very well’ badge.

Best Stories:

• Gary Vaynerchuck: One guy wrote that he was buying wine for his daughter’s wedding. I called him to say congrats. He said, no, my daughter is 12, but it’s such a good deal that I’m stocking up.

Best Logistics:

Yes, it matters.

• Volunteers: There are a volunteers everywhere, I think mostly university students on spring break, and they’re extremely helpful (and friendly)
• WiFi: Wow, huge conference, everybody is using the internet, and it works.

Biggest Disappointments:

• Not enough power cords for geezers like me who are not using iPads or netbooks
• Nobody asked Paul Reubens to prove he was in Texas

Best Lessons:

• Marissa Mayer: When we’re trying to launch a new product, engineers often say “this isn’t good enough yet for the Google name.” We say, no, that’s how the Google name was built, putting cool new things out there and seeing how people respond.
• Guy Kawasaki:
  • Trust others. You have to trust others before they trust you. Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom through their return policies say I trust you. [Reminds me of a Joe Mantegna line "why do they call us con men? Because people have confidence in us? No, because we have confidence in people.]
  • Conduct a pre-mortem. If we ever have a post-mortem on this project, what are the most likely causes of failure that we’d be discussing.
• Jared Spool: We compared successful companies with unsuccessful ones [at Web design]. The unsuccessful ones all told us “our problem is that we don’t have a good process.” But none of the successful companies used a process. The biggest problem for the unsuccessful companies was that they thought the right way to do this was through a formal process.
• Reid Hoffman: In Web 1.0 we got data. In Web 2.0 we’re creating data through social networking, blogging, even implicit data such as location. The next big ideas will involve using the data generated by Web 2.0 apps.
• Steve Krug: When fixing problems, always do the least you can do  (courteously pre-tweeted by Krug himself).

For more in the series, see:

• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009