I love the SMX search conferences. They’re fun, they’re informative, and I get to spend time with people that I really like.

Here’s what I’m most looking forward to:

You&A with Matt Cutts

5:00 – 6:00 PM Tuesday

The Matt Cutts / Danny Sullivan one on one is the most fun and informative session of the year. And they’ve added an extra 15 minutes to what used to be a 45 minute session.

“We don’t tell you what to do, you can do whatever you want to, it’s your site. But we can do whatever we want to on our site to best serve our users.” — Matt Cutts, SMX Advanced 2010 (paraphrased)

Danny: Do you still get that boost if you buy AdSense? Matt: Aargh!! — SMX Advanced 2010

Marty Madness

9:00 – 10:15 AM, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM Tuesday

Worried that jet lag or exhaustion will stop you from enjoying the first sessions? Fear not. Marty Weintraub is speaking in each of the first two time slots: Hardcore Social Tactics and Surviving Personalization.

“Use Facebook to target businesses. Raise your hand if you have a Facebook account. Raise your hand if you have a job. See …” — Marty Weintraub, SMX Israel 2012

Ask the SEOs

3:00 – 4:15 PM Wednesday

Ask the SEOs is always a fun session. The top SEOs let loose answering questions and bantering. The Wall Street Journal’s Alex Bennert recently joined the regulars: Vanessa Fox, Bruce Clay, Greg Boser, Rae Hoffman-Dolan and Todd Friesen. This is the session where you get the best interaction between the experts, and the best feel for what’s really true today.

“I can’t wait until my daughter is in college so I can get my hands on her edu account. We chose her college based on domain value.” — Greg Boser, Ask the SEOs, SMX Advanced 2009

“My biggest waste of time the past few years? Optimizing for Yahoo.” — Rae Hoffman-Dolan, Ask the SEOs, SMX East 2010

Historic tidbit: The Ask the SEOs session was introduced in 2009, replacing a “Give it up” session that some argued was too black hat.

Maile & Vanessa on Pagination & Canonical URLs

It started at the Vanessa Fox portion (advanced technical SEO) of last year’s SMX West with a smackdown between Maile Ohye from Google and Marshall Simmonds from About.com / New York Times. Marshall said it was OK to canonical all pages of an article back to the article’s main page. Maile said no. Punches were thrown (OK, maybe not). Maile: “Believe me, if the page isn’t a subset of the other, it’s a signal. You can believe him or you can believe me, who was talking to our indexing people the other day.” Marshall (whom Danny once called the poster child of SEO success) didn’t back down, implying that it worked for them.

A few months later at SMX East Maile announced a new Google feature, a pagination tag, to do what Marshall wanted.

Now Maile and Vanessa Fox return, with Adam Audette and Jeff Carpenter, to explain how it all works now.

Authority Building

1:45 – 3:00 PM Tuesday

SEO is increasingly about authority. And Eric Enge is a great speaker.

“We gave SEO training seminar to government webmasters, got lots of links from USA.gov. And they paid costs and speaking fee.” — Eric Enge, SMX Advanced 2011 (paraphrased)

“We contacted Boston.com and Washington Post, and asserted that we had authority. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t. We got links or article placements.  – Eric Enge, SMX Advanced 2011 (paraphrased)

Authorship & Schema

10:45 AM – Noon Wednesday

An increasingly important area, especially as Google’s Knowledge Graph plays a larger role.

SEO & Social Power Tools

3:30 – 4:45 PM Tuesday

Michael King, Merry Morud, Rhea Drysdale. Can’t miss.

“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.” — Michael King, SMX Israel 2012

The Bing Keynote

9:00 – 10:00 AM Wednesday

Truth is, this session has been hit or miss. Usually miss. Usually just an annual reminder that last year when Microsoft said it got it’s act together regarding search it was wrong. In each of the six years of SMX Advanced, Microsoft has brought in a new search executive to give the keynote. They were MSN, then Live, and now Bing. They were the search engine that gave you cash back. Then they were a Decision Engine. They had a great keynote in 2010 with Yusuf Mehdi but now he’s off heading the XBox division. This year it’s Derrick Connell. Derrick was a C programmer on the London stock exchange before joining Microsoft in 92, leading MSN Europe, and later helping to launch Bing. Now he’s in charge of Bing. Let’s see what you got, Derrick.

“How many of you have used Bing?” (a lot of hands) “Oh, how many of you haven’t used Bing?” (about 5 hands) (To Bing’s Qi Lu: ) “OK, so you’re spending $80 billion to convince him.” — Danny Sullivan, SMX Advanced 2010

“My 8-year-old daughter wrote a list of all her friends using Bing, and all her friends using that other search engine. ” [He showed us the list; he has a copy framed at work.] “My daughter said to me “Daddy. We have a lot of work to do.” – Yusuf Mehdi, SMX Advanced 2010

@toddmintz: Playing Talking Heads “Road To Nowhere” before Microsoft keynote…incredible symbolism at play :) [hat tip: Lisa Barone]

There’s also a Monday evening meet & greet, a Tuesday night party at the aquarium, and a post-conference bowling party.

I hope to see you there.

Don’t have tickets? The show is sold out, but you still have the following options:

• SMX Workshop passes are still available. Attend in-depth workshops on June 7th – check them out here.
• Network passes are $99 for those who register online before June 4 ($150 on-site). Take a look at the pass benefits.

• Follow the conference on Twitter (#smx)
• Read our live blogging and Best of SMX Advanced (coming June 5th & 6th).

Related tidbits:

• The pre-conference Meet & Greet is on the 5th anniversary of the SMX conference series. Though one review of that conference wondered if that first SMX Advanced “damaged brand Danny” (in hindsight: no) most reviews were favorable. Karl Ribas wrote “Never before have I seen so many Googlers at one conference. Yahoo! and MSN also had a stronger presence than I’ve seen in the past. You really got the feeling that the search engines were interested in knowing what thoughts, ideas, suggestions, and opinions this group had bring to the table.” (Community tip: Starting the SMX conference series with an intimate gathering of advanced SEOs and search engine reps was a masterstroke.)
• The Seattle Mariners are out of town, which is OK, since I hear Ken Griffey Jr. retired. And my wonderful wife is taking me to ballgames in three other cities this trip.
• Seattle has a great Kosher vegan restaurant and SMX is excellent regarding special meal needs.

See you there!

There were a lot of things I liked about being a full-time employee at the same startup for more than 12 years (yes, even after 12 years it still felt like a startup). Being a core part of the team. Having daily contact with great people. The monthly paycheck was nice.

One of the best things was that I didn’t need to prove myself every day. Not that I could slack off. Just that I had built up enough credibility that I could afford to frequently fail on the company dime. Good failures. Usually. The kind where you say “This was a good experiment to run, it failed, what’s next?” It’s much harder to utter those words when you have to follow them with “pay me anyway.” My employers knew that my successes over 12 years contributed more than enough value to compensate for the frequent failures without which valuable successes are improbable.

But now I’m a consultant, working with new clients. Which leaves a few options:

1. Do exactly the same things I’d do as an employee. Make clear to the clients that they’re paying for me swinging the bat, underpaying for successes and sometimes paying for failures.
2. Charge for value created. Don’t charge when I fail, but take a hefty percentage of the value I create when I succeed.
3. Charge a lot for my time and only bill the client when I succeed.
4. Don’t fail.

Each of these options has its place, and its problems.

Charging by the hour

I pay my accountant and my lawyer for their time, even if the result of that time is them coming back to me and saying “I thought I found a nice solution for you, but no, you’re screwed.” And yes I get annoyed, but I understand that it’s a reasonable system.

Charging by value

On lawsuits, lawyers sometimes take a percentage of the winnings. If they lose they only charge expenses.

In theory this is a great way to work if you can live with unsteady income. But in practice it usually makes things too complicated. Whenever I’m dealing with a very small client I want to say “I know you don’t have a lot of money to pay me, so I’ll accept a small percentage of your company.” But I think that would be too rude and aggressive.

Charging a percentage of value created can work well when you’re generating easily measurable short-term revenue, but it’s much trickier when you’re creating long-term value.

This can also work if you can separate a piece that you can own or co-own. We recently changed our relationship with a client, becoming his retailer instead of his consultant. Instead of charging him to build an internet distribution channel that he owned, we built our own and buy his product at his wholesale price and resell it with a markup. At that point, you’ve shifted from consulting to entrepreneurship.

Charge a lot, and don’t charge for the failures

This may be the best approach for high-end products and services. You can even explicitly offer a guarantee. This can be a nice approach if there’s sufficient trust. Prospective customers must trust you enough to agree to high prices. You have to trust yourself and your customers that you’ll deliver significant value and that the customer will acknowledge the success.

Don’t fail

Don’t fail is a good solution in some closed, objective, predictable systems. If you’re a house painter and success is defined by the walls becoming forest green. Don’t fail is nice when you can follow a repeatable process and all deviations from the norm are failures that you can and should avoid.

But Don’t fail can be a horrible approach in open, subjective systems filled with uncertainty. In such systems, failure is the norm. In these cases, success is a lot more complicated than following a rule book and adhering to the norms.

Succeeding vs not failing

I recently paid somebody else for a site review on one of our sites. I like getting other people’s opinions, and this was a well trusted industry insider who was performing audits at very reasonable prices.

I was disappointed by what I got back. Not surprised, but disappointed. It felt like they just took a template site audit, deleted the problems that didn’t apply to my site, did some search and replaces to get my site name in there, took some screen shots, added a few sentences, and were done.

There are two attitudes you can have when performing a site review, or almost any job. You can focus on covering all the items on the checklist, or you can try to imagine the website’s most likely paths to success.

A checklist is often a good place to start, and there’s a lot of evidence that those that deem themselves “creative types” too often miss the obvious things that a more disciplined checklist-approach would catch.

And maybe at that point the “website review” has been concluded and anything beyond that is a separate project.

A checklist-based project is great from a consultant’s point of view. You have a nice repeatable process and you can declare success simply by hitting all the points on the checklist.

But this approach only succeeds at spotting deviations from the norm and (at best) determining which of those are failures.

The wellness and positive psychology movements are based on the premise that we greatly limit ourselves when we focus on the presence and absence of diseases. Physical and mental health can be so much more than that. We have the same problem when we focus our site audits, and subsequent suggestions, only on how a site deviates from the norm.

The greatest value we provide is usually when we go beyond the repeatable process and try to imagine and create. Yes, that takes time, and doesn’t guarantee success. Even worse, most of our ideas are not good enough to implement. Analyzing each one takes time. It’s awfully hard to charge a client for researching a company and its environment, coming up with ideas, analyzing each one, and determining that none are worth the client diverting scare resources to. I generally find that I keep working until I have ideas that I’m happy with and then I bill for only a fraction of my time. Which is not a great way to work.

The best way to get paid for all your time is to focus on the areas where you can declare success by completing a repeatable process. But the best way to create value is to go wider and deeper; to imagine new possibilities and to soberly evaluate each one.

The best way to provide significant value is not a great way to guarantee payment.

I suspect much of this problem goes away after I build up a base of long-term clients, but that takes time.

What do you do?

Image courtesy of  Brian Hillegas

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

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

Let’s consider 4 archetypes for SEOs.

Snake-Oil Salesman

The first is the snake-oil salesman. The memory that keeps coming back to me on this is the consultant who, at the end of our meeting when it was clear we weren’t hiring him, took a fatherly tone and said “whether or not you use us, you really should find some SEO and tell him you’ll give him a percentage of earnings for traffic he can bring to your home page. You have nothing to lose.” I think he meant that he had nothing to lose. If his tactics resulted in long-term damage to my site he’d still be fine, especially if he was lucky enough to get paid before the site got torched.

I’ve heard this guy speak at conferences, and BTW he’s an awesome speaker. He mostly works on his own sites, and he jokes about “if things go wrong you tell Google that you’re really sorry, you had no idea the SEO you hired was shady. Then you blame some Malaysian SEO. Google lets you back in quicker when you out an SEO.” I’m not sure whether or not his service includes a list of Malaysian SEOs you can frame. He probably takes care of the re-inclusion request, so I guess it’s part of the package.

Stay away from these guys.

Faker

Faker may be a strong word. It’s pretty easy to learn a few buzzwords and position yourself as an SEO. It’s much harder to develop significant knowledge and skill in the area. Perhaps just as bad, these people may think they know, but be misinformed, or undisciplined, or just not that good.

SEO Expert

There are some real SEO experts out there. They’ve reverse engineered significant parts of the Google algorithms through controlled experimentation and private conversations with fellow experts. These people often make most of their money on their own sites. Some of their tactics are short lived, but they make quite a living by frequently adjusting to Google’s tweaks.

Greatness-Based SEO

The final archetype I want to discuss is Greatness-Based SEO. These people are committed to creating remarkable pages that people want to read and to which sites want to link. They focus on establishing authority and brand leadership. They’ll get the technical stuff right and employ smart techniques, but fundamentally they’re focused on doing great things to attract traffic and links.

Some Greatness-Based SEOs (GBSs) can be insufferable for a number of reasons.Some base their approach on a false belief that greatness and business goals are always 100% correlated. Some refuse to consider that they may be making business sacrifices in their pursuit of greatness. Some are hopelessly naive. They can also often be insufferable moralizers.

Finally some GBSs can often be dangerous because they often have market-hostile definitions of greatness. If you define greatness not by what the market wants but by your tastes and whims then you better pray you’re the one in a million for whom that works.

So if you aspire to be a Greatness-Based SEO, make sure to avoid those pitfalls.

But done right, Greatness-Based SEO can be the best path towards long term success. You figure out what Googlers want that you can deliver, and that serves your business goals.You build goodwill and authority. You establish strong relationships within the community, and with the community’s other thought leaders. You’re not chasing the algorithm, you’re chasing the community. It’s not for everybody, and it doesn’t work in all situations. And frankly, it’s only a route to pursue if you’re looking not only for profitability, but also for greatness.

So, which are you?

” … the old South Indian Monkey Trap … depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey’s hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped—by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can’t revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it.”

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Yes, Google Panda should make the Web better. Panda penalizes sites for having too many low quality pages, which will stop sites from throwing up millions of crap pages in the hope that a small percentage will rank. It’s like gmail’s spam filter blocking a good e-mail because too many other of that sender’s e-mail were deemed spam.

And yet …

There’s a systems problem.

• Because Panda is a sitewide penalty there is little correlation between the pages that lose traffic and the ones that cause the penalty.
• Because Panda runs infrequently (roughly once a month) the actions that will help your business today have no correlation (or more likely negative correlation) with the actions that will help you escape the Panda.

If that’s not bad enough, it seems to take more than one clean bill of health from Panda to escape the penalty box.

So in the long term, Google Panda incentivizes the behavior that Google wants. But in the short term, executives have a choice. They can try to get back some of the lost traffic. Or they can not only accept the losses but also inflict more short term pain on their sites in the hope that a few months down the line their successors will get out of the Panda penalty box.

If you’re thinking “you shouldn’t have gotten into this mess,” well, first of all, that’s often not a fair claim. I remain of the opinion that eHow is guilty of little more than aggressive pre-IPO PR. And Reference Answers was hit for spending over a million dollars a year licensing non-exclusive content from top publishers in order to serve their users.

eHow's Panda Double Dip (source: Alexa)

eHow can claim (correctly, IMO) that they were unfairly put in the same bucket as spammers by interested parties (for more on this see Rich Skrenta, Praying for Spam and Google’s Decline: Myth or Fact).

But like the monkey in the South Indian trap, eHow must let go of whatever asset is holding it back. Economists talk a lot about sunk costs. Well, sunk assets is an important concept too. The food in the monkey’s hand is a sunk asset if the monkey can never eat it, but it’s against all of our instincts to let it go. Sometimes you have to mentally relinquish ownership of a lost or toxic asset so that you can move forward again.

I was wrong when I wrote that Panda “better aligns our short & long term interests.” Panda takes at least a month or two to recover from so there’s still a critical disconnect between short & long term interests. So Panda is fatal to monkeys. Let’s hope you’re not one.

Image courtesy of Rick Weiss

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

Entering the final afternoon of SMX London, starting with Refriending Google: Dealing With Penalties & Suspensions.

@cjsherman @cdanuloff @demib @Wysz

Chris does the intro. We’re all aware of what’s happened with Panda. It’s not that Google is trying to be evil. There are plenty of acceptable ways to say “hey, I really didn’t do anything wrong.”

We’re leading off with Michael Wyszomierski (well, Chris gave up on trying to pronounce his last name), from Google.

So first, become friends with Google by creating a Google friendly site. And learn what can put that friendship at risk.

Don’t try to trick search engines [Anybody remember the "It's not nice to fool mother nature" commercial? Google's like mother nature, but more powerful]

Avoid hidden text or links.

Shows a site that looks nice, but has tons of hidden text. That’s bad.

Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords

[OK, not really complaining here, but I'm pretty sure I've seen this slide deck before, possibly at SphinnCon Jerusalem a few months ago.]

Don’t participate in link schemes that are intended to manipulate Page Rank.

Shows example of an e-mail sent to Matt Cutts offering a link exchange.

Avoid doorway pages, pages created just for search engines.

Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects

Here’s how we do spamfighting at Google

Beyond just talking to people like you and saying “please don’t spam.”

There’s algorithmic spam fighting and manual spam fighting. When you fill out a spam report it goes to our team for manual consideration. Actions from the manual team have a time out period, though we can renew them.

If you made a change afterwards, file a Reconsideration Request.

How do you know if it’s a spam issue?

• They’re sending a lot more messages in Webmaster Tools.
• You may know you’ve violated the rules
• If you’ve been hacked. They’re seeing a lot more of that lately, unfortunately.
• If you recently bought a domain

It’s probably not spam if you’re just not ranking as well as you’d like.

Opt-in to email forwarding in Webmaster Tools.

File for reconsideration AFTER you’ve cleaned EVERYTHING up.

Tips:

• Note previous violations
• Don’t hide or mislead [it's not nice to fool mother nature]
• Don’t submit multiple requests, but it’s OK if you have new info
• Tell us what you did to fix the violation

Q: What if I cleaned up my site but there are bad links to me.

So see if you can get the links removed. Maybe you asked for those links in the first place. Otherwise note it in the request. Shows example:

“I previously purchased links. I’ve removed what I could. Here’s what I couldn’t remove.”

Be patient, they can’t respond to every request.

They’ve been sending some responses:

• Manual spam action revoked
• Site still violates guideleines
• There was no manual action taken against your site

Chris: Thank you Michael, now we’ll hear from the spammers … I mean practitioners.

And now we have Mikkel. A former black hatter who has been channeling Matt Cutts all conference (while dressed like Liberacci). I guess the same way I’m live-blogging since Lisa Barone and Barry Schwartz aren’t here, Mikkel figured since Matt and Vanessa are missing he’d play that role today.

You may think you’re penalized when really:

• Your site or market changed
• You got hit by algo changes and updates
• You got hit by filtering: Not the same as penalization. Not always in real time.
• You’re being penalized [even paranoids have enemies]. This is much less common than people think.

What could be wrong?

• Did your web server slow down? Monitor your site performance. The worst case he saw was when he was hosted by RackSpace, suddenly dropped out of search. RackSpace decided that the engines were taking up too much bandwidth so they blocked them all. Oops.
• Did you (or your engineers) make changes to your site? Worst example: An engineer redirected all users who didn’t support javascript to a page saying “please install JavaScript.” Oops. Make sure your engineers and decision makers understand search engine basics.
• Did quality factors like Bounce Rate change on your site?
• Did you get hacked. [A lot of talk about that at this conference. Seems to be a growing issue. Scary.]

Use Google Webmaster Tools! If you have any bad spikes, find out what’s going on.

Discusses monitoring your market. There may be newer and better sites, better optimized, video or other objects. Maybe you just suck.

Filtering and algo changes. You don’t get penalized for Duplicate Content. It’s a filter. You often have to fix the problem and wait to be respidered. Filtering problems are usually pretty easy to fix. Google’s not mad at you, they’re just protecting their index.

Algo changes happen all the time. 300-500 per year. WATCH OUT – a lot of the public info is NOT accurate.

Most penalizations are automated. Things like hidden text and links, sneaky redirects. Often you’ll get notified in Webmaster Tools, and you can fix the problem and get back in.

The worst kind are the Manual Penalizations. In that case you need to apply for a reconsideration. Fix everything. Be brutally honest. Don’t do it again. Most engines have a 2 strikes and you’re out policy. The engines like knowing who caused the problem. You may need a scapegoat.

There’s no law against breaking the guidelines. Be honest with yourself. Google isn’t listening to your clever arguments. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that Google won’t mind because of some clever argument you have. If you’re violating the guidelines make sure you have a backup plan. “And you can always use a competitors SEO agency as the scapegoat. No, don’t do that, that’s really bad advice.”

And now it’s Craig Macdonald from Covario.

• Don’t cloak
• Clean up your content
• Document everything
• Fall on your sword. Practice your “aw, shucks” face. They don’t want to hear excuses.

Spammy links:

• Stop paying for links. It’s a difficult conversation with your client. It will cause short term pain. [And probably long term pain].
• Clean up your link profile
• Document everything. Keep track of every link and all the communication with webmasters. [Wow, he sends this whole audit trail on to Google. I'm getting images of a Law & Order episode "I'll take the death penalty off the table if you give up your supplier. And wear a wire."]

Did a correlation analysis.

• Value of optimized content in predicting ranking has been going down. He thinks it’s because the competition is better at this so there’s less opportunity here.
• Keywords in URL have high correlation.
• H1 tag still matters
• Quality links. Not quantity. Having a body count of links is almost irrelevant. 5 Quality Links may be worth more than 50,000 low quality links.
• Page load times are very important.

Bing vs Google

• Bing is even less interested than Google in link quantity. Need quality links.
• Google really hates having to wait
• Bing is far more sensitive to localization than Google

Panda

They wrote a white paper on this. Their clients were generally helped by Panda.

Search engines want relevancy:

• UGC
• Distributed link strategy (infographics)
• Quality links

You can download their white paper from covario.com.

And finally, Craig Danuloff from ClickEquations

He’s talking about the paid side. Particularly Quality Score. Just wrote a book on it, coming out at SMX Advanced in Seattle.

Quality Score is Google looking backword at your keyword / ad copy pair to find out what’s going to work best in the future to:

• make them the most money
• satisfy the user
• help you

Secret formula, known only the Colonel and 2 guys in Atlanta. OK, I made that up.

Here are the factors:

• CTR. It’s not the CTR they tell you about. It’s specifically for the cross-section of Keyword+AdCopy, Account, Display URL, Geography
• Relevance. Also doesn’t mean what you think it does [but he doesn't clarify]
• Other, mostly penalties, on things that occur after the click.

The effects of Quality Score:

• Are you in the game? Can you show up?
• What position should you get?
• How much do you pay per click
• What is the keywords’ “First Page Bid Estimate”

QS below 4 or 5? Big problem. Unless it’s really satisfying some business need get rid of these.

With a score of 4 – 6 you can probably work at it.

At 7 you win. You generally only do better if you have some systemic advantage, like it’s a brand term … or you’re cheating.

How is Ad Rank calculated?

• Bid * Quality Score = Ad Rank

How is CPC calculated?

• Next Ad Rank / Your Quality Score = CPC

He thinks people spend far too much time managing their bids. Focus more on your Quality Score.

How to get a Landing Page Quality Score penalty:

• Provide bad user experience
• Violate guidelines
• Choose a “Questionable business model”
• Choose a problematic market space

Poor landing page experience tend to be things that are genuinely bad. Usually if you have these you already know it:

• Very slow
• No privacy policy
• Little original content
• Too many ads
• Missing ‘About Us’ w/ contact info
• Fail to disclose on email requests
• Pop-ups, bots, or unexpected coe

Landing Page Quality score is a binary function. If you’re OK, you’re OK.

Landing pages can hurt Quality Score, they can’t help.

They recently took all these aggressive behaviors and pulled these out of Landing Page Quality and now they’ll just suspend your site.

Questionable business models: Get rich quick, eBooks, email collection, click arbitrage, affiliate. He doesn’t really understand the problem with eBooks, guesses that they’re often used to provide minimal value. Most controversial is the idea of the Affiliate links.

Bad neighborhoods: Even if you’re 100% legit, you’ll have a problem if you’re in health care, sexual products, financial products. You’re presumed guilty. You need to prove yourself.

Path to redemption: Fix, apologize, request forgiveness, wait (landing page crawlers can take days or weeks), repeat. [Though according to what Mikkel was saying, repeat doesn't really work. They're much less likely to forgive the second time. Unless of course "repeat" implies with a different site that Google wouldn't connect to the previously penalized one].

–

And we’re up to Q&A.

Question for Michael. How many reconsideration requests do you get and how often do you manually intervene.

Michael: The exact number won’t be that helpful to you. We get  a lot. But we do get through them pretty quickly. In most cases there is no penalty, it’s some other issue. That’s why we’re sending those messages now.

–

Q: Give example of a site that was filtered

Mikkel: Hackers got into my database. Google found out and put up a message on my listings. That’s how I found out. I cleaned it up and was back in.

–

Q: What advice would you give to webmasters of large sites that don’t always provide the resources to clean up a problem.

Mikkel: 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. Prioritize. Be realistic about what you can handle. You have to manage it.

Craig M: With one of our clients all products have to go through an off-shore tech team, through some difficult process. 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 fail. [Boy I hate that. But yeah. Of course, he is an interested party. Maybe consultants' sales pitches should be "I'll tell your boss what you're telling him, but I'll do it in a deep authoritative voice while wearing an expensive suit." Or is that already the implied consultants' sales pitch?]

Michael: You can always not show the content to Google through robots.txt or something while you’re waiting for the resources to fix the problem.

And we’re done. I’m moderating the next session so I won’t be blogging it.

More SMX London coverage:

• Best of SMX London
• Extreme Makeover SEO Edition
• Keyword Research Ninja Tactics
• Search Analytics & Competitive Intelligence
• What’s Really Important for Technical SEO?
• Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold
• SEO in 2011: What’s working, what’s not

OK, getting ready for Keyword Research Ninja Tactics on Day 2 of SMX Advanced London.