SMX Conference Wrap Up

By mgray
In conference  

I got back from SMX Advanced late Wednesday night, and while I’ll spend the next few days playing catch up here are some of my overall impressions of the conference.

Overall I have to say the conference was really good. It was great to be able to have some interesting high level discussions with other attendees. It was also a refreshing change to go to a conference and see a lot of new sessions I haven’t seen before. Another great part was finally meeting people I have been talking with online for years but who don’t normally “do shows”. It was also fun meeting people who just came up to say “hi” and read my blog or stories I publish elsewhere.

For me a two day conference was probably a little too short, I think three days is really the optimal length. One other thing that stood out as being easily fixable would be to get two people working the Q&A microphones instead of one, the room was so wide it slowed things down, other than that I really don’t have much to complain about, and I totally like the “casual dress conference” idea. Danny did a really good job trying to get the engines, speakers, and audiences involved an try to start a dialog aimed at solving some of the problems we all face. I’d like to see more open discussions about about a lot more of the issues. For example I was at the airport and ran into Brent who runs Weird Asia News (a pretty funny website if you’ve never visited) we had a nice discussion about cloaking. Having an honest discussion about cloaking/IP delivery would really be great. Obviously the New York Times and several other websites are doing it in a way the engines consider acceptable, why not give away tools to allow other people to accomplish the same goals. In this era of new and more clearly defined Webmaster guidelines give some clear examples of what is or isn’t acceptable. What do you say Matt (pinged just to get your attention) how about leveling the playing field a little and not showing favoritism to the big guys.

One of the sessions that caused a bit of angst was the duplicate content session. It was the first session so everyone can be forgiven for not knowing exactly how high to bring the conversation. However some really good suggestions were made on how to use parameters or tags the engines would ignore. I made a request for this exact feature almost a year ago. The engines had a very cold reception to the suggestions saying only high level people would implement it. If you don’t take steps to grow up some part of the industry at some point you get stuck and stagnate. When cell phones first came out they were clunky, not very user friendly, and used by very few people, but look at where we are now. So in case any of you engineers are reading I’d like a parameter that gets ignored anywhere in the query string, and a parameter that says ignore everything that comes after this.

For those of you not lucky enough to attend check out the SMX Wrap Up Posts for day 1 and day 2 for coverage from Lisa and Susan of Bruce Clay, Barry and Tamar of SERoundtable, Andy and Jordan from Marketing Pilgrim and Rhea from Search Engine journal. Web Pro News has some videos as does SEOMoz.

Lastly a special thanks to Rand and the whole SEOMoz crew. Not only did they come out on Sunday and show us around the city, but they threw a kick ass “after party”, you guys rock!

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