I was fortunate to spend 3 days at the SMX Sydney, including the third day that was just for those with an Elite pass. Without a doubt this was the best SEO conference I have been to. All the speakers were top notch. Those speakers representing Google and Bing weren’t terribly interesting, but they add value by validating the conference itself, and they seemed like nice folk. Here are the speakers that impressed me the most:
Rand Fishkin – always entertaining, always packs a lot into his time slot. On the 3rd day he showed us the latest results from his PhD staff on what Google seems to be using for ranking factors, but he stressed over and over that correlation does not equal causation. And then when he compared the results with a survey of top SEO professionals, they very much aligned. Google appears to be ranking sites based on the factors the experts expect.
A big tip, especially following Panda/Farmer, is that either a lot of sites with short articles have stopped ranking, OR Google is penalizing short articles or sites that consistently have articles of a similar short length – a very good indicator that the content has been purchased cheaply and therefore is of weaker quality.
Danny Sullivan gave a good overview of where search is currently at, and that is his forte. I guess it is helpful that such a good speaker runs the SMX show. His partner in crime, Chris Sherman, turned up unannounced, good to see.
I won’t get into the technical details of what the SEO superstars presented, but suffice to say Marty Wientraub and Greg Boser were top notch, and I doubt better experts could be found. Plus they are both bald, indicative of the macho side of craving #1 rankings. Chris Thomas of RESEO is also bald, but I missed his presentation. I reckon I have a higher average trust in bald seos.
Rob Kerry of Ayima is also an SEO legend, and on Day 3 he let us in on some tools spammers use, so that we can use them for good.
Dennis Goedegbuure let us see what a nightmare/fun time can he had trying to get eBay listings rank in the search engines.