I’m at SMX West and I’m actually attending a panel, rather than moderating! Woo hoo! I moderated seven sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was super awesome and I’m totally blogging how it all went, but for now, I’m finally in the audience for a session, so you’re hearing about that first!

Before I get started with my mad live blogging skilz, I thought I’d share a little story. Throughout the session, the panelists would sometimes listen to another answer and then thoughtfully chime in “Google agrees with that”. Well, not if it was the Microsoft rep. He would say “Ask agrees with that.” Because that’s funnier. Anyway. What’s up with all the serious agreeing?

Well, if you’ve been to search conferences in the past and you’ve seen Eytan Seidman from Microsoft on a panel, he would sometimes save everyone time and confusion by seriously commenting “Microsoft agrees with that” after another search engine rep would answer. Efficient and concise, yes. But also funny!

Eytan recently left Microsoft Live Search and several of his search friends, including Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz and Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye of Google showed their love for him by mocking his search conference answering techniques on video. I could describe it, but really, you should just watch it. Here’s a very short clip. .

I know, what the hell was Matt talking about? Seriously, you should just watch the entire video, which is 15 minutes long, and doesn’t have much to do with linking, and it will all make sense.

And now, onto the live blogging! Which at some point became trying-to-remember-after-the-fact blogging as my battery died.

Paid Links? No One Cares About That Topic, Right?
Any of you who are involved in search at all will be shocked and amazed to hear that the discussion focused largely on paid links. Crazy! Who would have thought! For those of you who aren’t in search and are thinking what the heck are paid links, you might check out a I wrote a post on Search Engine Land a while back that summarized the world of paid links throughout 2007.

Reps from all the engines are on the panel, and as it turns out, Matt Cutts is against paid links! And wants everyone to use nofollow! Rae Hoffman is representing search marketers on the panel (along with Todd Malicoat) and wants to know why search engines, after creating a link economy, are putting all the responsibility on webmasters to figure out when to use nofollow. (It certainly is the case that lots of people with websites have never even heard of nofollow and yet the engines are expecting them to use it.) All the engines say they’re working on it! Stop being so mean! And Rae is all, well stop banning me then! That’s even meaner! And then there was a duel.

Am I kidding? If you were here, you would know.

Link Sabotage! Not Impossible! But Really Hard!
Someone then asked if link sabotage is possible. Rae’s like, heck yeah! Matt said, well, it’s not “impossible”, because maybe nothing is impossible. But it’s really frickin’ hard. Todd and Rae looked unconvinced.

But It’s Scary To Change Domains
Someone asked about moving a site, and everyone on the panel spent lots of lots of time trying to one-up each other with the best tip. Oh, you want to know what they are? Right then.

• Always use 301 redirects when moving pages.
• Don’t change the site content and infrastructure at the same time you change domains. I know, I know! It’s tempting! You think that since you’re rebranding the site, you should just go for the full rebrand all at once. But see, the search engines get confused easily and if the old page matches the new page, they don’t get lost and wander around. If the new page is totally different, they just get all flustered and distracted and it may take them a while to figure things out. Move the pages, make sure the new ones are ranking in the place of the old ones, and then start any redesign efforts.
• This is really part of the last bullet, but the suggestion not to change content? Really don’t do it. If the new pages aren’t ranking and you’ve changed the content, it’ll be hard to know if the ranking change is because the move didn’t happen correctly from a technical perspective or if the search engine no longer thinks the page is about what it was before.
• Move a section at a time if you can. This way, you make sure you’re doing everything correctly, and if you do experience a temporary ranking dip, it’ll be for only a portion of your site rather than the whole thing. Once the section seems to be ranking where it should be, start moving another section.
• If you aren’t experienced at this kind of thing, hire a professional to help! Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search recommended hiring an SEO for this kind of major effort. I know! A search engine recommending an SEO! We can all get along after all! After this part of the session, the SEOs and search reps all joined hands and bought the world a Coke! And then flowers rained down from the sky. You so should have been there.
• If the domain name change is part of a company name change, make sure the old company name still appears in your content. This can be as easy as a sentence that says something like “My Awesome Company, formerly called My Mediocre Company…” The thing is, the site likely got a fair amount of traffic from the site name and if that name no longer appears anyone on the site, all those rankings are gone and that traffic is lost. Plus, your loyal customers from before the switch might feel all confused and forsaken. The panelists didn’t mention this tip; I’m just throwing it in as a bonus.

User-Generated Content Links: Can They Be More Than Links You Give Yourself?
What about links from user-generated content? Todd said that if you have a balance of links, you’ll be OK. If 100% of your links are from user-generated content, then the engines just might think you’re signing up for every social site in the world, sitting at home drinking Mad Dog 20/20 and eating cheetos, and staying up all night just adding comment after comment with a link to your site. And seriously, Mad Dog 20/20 just doesn’t go well with cheetos.

Does It Matter Who You Link To?
Matt said if you’re linking out to scuzzy, spammy sites, Google might think you’re hanging out with friends who are a bad influence on you. Just like your mom always told you.

Should you link out at all? Todd said this isn’t discussed much, but is pretty important. Who you’re linking to can tell search engines about your site as well as get those other sites’ attention. Rae said outlink when it makes sense for the user. The search engine reps were so proud they could barely stand it.

Sure, search engine optimization is important, but users are what you’re ultimately after anyway, so your primary goal is to make them happy. Without them, what’s the point? It’ll just be you and your page of lolcats. And that would be a sad internet indeed.

Tags: Conferences, Linking

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Blog, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.