SEO in The Desert

Here’s a wrap-up of the day by day and some of the sessions I attended at SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara, CA, February 26-28, 2008.

SMX BASH

Bruce Clay & Danny Sullivan (with attractive young woman – sorry, I didn’t get her name!) at SMX Bash to kick off the conference.

A shot of some of the folks enjoying the SMX Bash to kick off SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara.

Danny said that there was a lot of discussion over the bag to offer at SMX West, but they came up with a winner. Unlike the totes I got at every other conference I have been to, this one is a backpack with several compartments, totally cool and something I will use long after I leave Santa Clara. Congrats to the folks at SMX West!

Day 1

Danny Sullivan gives his take on Search 3.0, blended search, and 4.0, personalized search, in his keynote. Sorry it’s a bit blurry. Taken in the dark with my iPhone.

A pre-session photo of Search Engine Land’s Venessa Fox and Yahoo!’s Sean Suchter.

Danny Sullivan quizzed teams from the big four search engines and a team of search marketing all-stars on search history at SMX West 2008 Search Bowl.

The victorious Google team took the SMX West 2008 Search Bowl trophy, defeating teams from Yahoo, Ask, Microsoft and the SEM All-Stars. read more »

The Search Bowl capped off the first day of SMX West 2008 with Danny Sullivan moderating a search history game show style competition between teams from the Big Four search engines – Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo! – along with an SEM All-Stars team.

Well, as usual, Google kicked butt and took home the trophy.

SMX West 2008 continues at the Santa Clara Convention Center with a keynote address on Wednesday morning from Louis Monier, Vice President of Products at Cuill, a new search engine attempting to set new standards in the filed of search. Monier is formerly with Google, eBay and Alta Vista.

SMX West runs through Thursday.

Yahoo informed us a while back that they had problems with our navigation at http://www.framesdirect.com. Apparently, on the bottom of some of our catalog pages we had links to “More designer eyeglasses” where we would list other brands. Say for instance someone is looking at Ray Ban eyeglasses on our Ray Ban catalog page. At the bottom, we’d have a section for “Other designer eyeglasses” and list Rodenstock and others that came close alphabetically. We figured it was handy for the user and is pretty standard. Heck, even Amazon.com does it.

Yahoo, however, considered the practice to be spammy and redundant. Of course, when you try to ask what they mean, they basically just repeat themselves (look at our guidelines, etc.) and won’t give you any information.

We couldn’t figure out why they felt this way. Our competition is doing the same thing (and a lot worse) and Yahoo wasn’t giving them any grief.

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