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.

Day 2

Chris Sherman handling the introductions for the keynote speech by Louis Monier on Day 2 of SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara.

Louis Monier, formerly with Alta Vista, eBay and Google, gave the keynote address on the past and future of search at Day 2 of SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara. Monier is currently Vice President of Products with Cuill.

Vanessa Fox, Aaron Wall, Andy Beal and Michael Gray on the panel of SEO and Blogging.

Rand Fishkin (standing), Vanessa Fox, Neil Patel, Barbara Boser and Michael Gray on the SEO and Social Media Marketing panel.

Jill Whalen (right) of High Rankings with friends at the networking event.

The SEO and User Generated Content panel. From left to right – Vanessa Fox, Rebecca Kelley, Andrew Goodman and Roger Montti.

The Google Groove party featured lots of food, drinks, entertainment booths and dancing.

Day 3

The final day of SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara featured a group keynote panel discussing Generation Next: Search in the Coming Decade. Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro (far right) and Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land (second from right) moderated. Panelists (from left) included Brad Goldberg of Microsoft, Peter Norvig of Google and Larry Heck of Yahoo!

Detlev Johnson of SearchReturn moderated the Industrial Strength SEO panel at SMX West 2008.

Panelists for the Industrial Strength SEO session included (left to right) Martin Laetsch of SEM Director, Inc., David Roth of Yahoo! and Marshall D. Simmonds of the New York Times.

The In House SEO Issues panel (from left) included Bill Macaitis of Fox Interactive Media, Paul Bruemmer of Red Door Interactive, William Scully of Siemens, Derek Wheeler of Microsoft and Bob Tripathi of Discover Financial Services.

Jessica Bowman, formerly with Yahoo! and now an SEO consultant, moderated the In House Issues panel.

Danny Sullivan moderated the Linking Q and A panel. Included in the panel were search marketers and representatives from the top search engines – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask.com.

From left to right: Nathan Buggia of Microsoft, Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl, Rae Hoffman of Sugarrae Internet Consulting and Danny Sullivan.

From left to right: Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts from Google, Priyank Garg of Yahoo! Search and Peter Linsley of Ask.com.

SMX West 2008 Wrap in Pictures is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

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.

SMX West 2008 Search Bowl Winners – Google! is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

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.

The “redundant” part is what we couldn’t figure out. After all, our drop down navigation is in a javascript, which isn’t spiderable, so we weren’t repeating links on the page. It just didn’t make sense.

So, we’re in the process of reinventing our navigation system to make the Yahoo Gods happy and hope to roll it out shortly, but a funny thing is happening. I just noticed in our ranking reports that a lot of our brand phrase keywords are ranking well in Yahoo.

Interesting. What appears to be happening is that the main page to the Frames Direct site is ranking for search phrases rather than the actual product page. For instance, we show a #1 rank in Yahoo for “abba sagami eyeglasses” for the main FD page and it appears to be finding “abba sagami” in the drop down and is obviously pulling “eyeglasses” off of the page.

What is really interesting is that if you view the source for our main page in IE, the links in the drop downs don’t show, which would lead me to believe the drop downs aren’t spiderable. If I spider the page with my spidering software, the drop down links don’t show up, either

But, if you view the source in Firefox, the drop down links appear and you can find “abba sagami” in it. This would lead me to believe that Yahoo is suddenly using technology similar to Firefox and can find those javascript drop down links.

Fascinating. Apparently Yahoo was seeing something that we weren’t. As far as they were concerned, our javascript dropdowns ARE spiderable, meaning we were repeating links on the pages.

Wow. That put a whole new spin on things. If they had explained this, we would have seen the light earlier, but as usual, they gave an edict with no explanation and left it with that. Communication is not one of Yahoo’s strengths.

But, this makes me wonder if Google will be following suit? If so, a lot of sites using drop down javascript navigation could be in for an interesting time.

Yahoo and Javascript Drop Downs is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO