Hey all, Here is my recap of the last day of pubcon. I have some tidbits on the Yahoo penalty, Google's supplemental results, etc. It was by far the most entertaining day watching the master panel go on a spam hunt outlining what NOT to do in the SEO arena. The most memorable was a lady who had fired her developers from India and was maintaining her site all by herself. But she only knew how to maintain/edit the homepage and nothing else. So she was adding all the meta tags for every other page on her site to her homepage. She had like 50 keyword meta sections, title sections, etc. Then she was only adding content to the homepage so there was like 50 pages worth of text and links, etc. The panelists made her come up afterwards and they invited developers from the crowd to come up and help her. A very good deed. Here are some of their general observations and recommendations: 1. Don't use link services, link exchanges or buy links. Rely on your good content to get ONE-WAY inbound links. 2. Keep your page titles short and sweet. Long titles look like you are trying to stuff some extra keywords, etc. 3. Make sure most pages have unique titles. 4. Avoid templating pages. Don't have hundreds of pages that have very similar content with the exception of a paragraph or two. Most of it will get flagged as duplicate content. 5. Try to keep most of your javascript in includes. Helps keep the source cleaner from a crawlers perspective since they don't have to look at it. 6. If your site is a business, be sure to register it with Google local and Yahoo yellow pages. Doing so helps boost your rank in local search. Pay attention to your site description when registering as well, since it will play a role in your ranking. http://sockmoney.blogspot.com/2006/11/pubcon-recap-day-3-spam-hunt.html Cheers!
I would definitely recommend going next year if you get a chance. Brett mentioned they probably won't be doing a spring pubcon since his family is expecting. So the next will probably be Vegas in November of 2007. He did mention they might try to do a few one-day sessions during the year before the main pubcon. I thought it was very worthwhile. There was a fair share of time-waster sessions, but overall the content and the speakers were well worth it. If you can find it online, I would recommend checking out the keynote speaker from the first day. Guy Kawasaki, founder and director of Garage Technology (venture funding firm) was very good. His speech was quite inspirational. I think they were going to try and fit it on the CD they are mailing out to all the folks who attended, so I'll try to get it online if I can. Overall it was a great value. I think I paid around $400 for my full admission. That included a decent free continental breakfast every day, free lunches with included your choice of a variety of sandwiches, wraps and subs with sides and dessert... and all you can drink freshments throughout the day. Plus all the free crap from the vendors (I walked away with like 5 t-shirts and tons of other crap).
No problem. I know that not everyone can afford or make time to go. I had been wanting to go for years but was not making enough money to justify it. This was my first year I could afford to do it. I'll definitely be going back next year. Plus beyond the sessions, if you are into networking it is a great event for that since they do some sort of social event every evening, whether just a cocktail hour or a dinnner party. I guess I should join their sales staff...;-)