News:

• Matt Cutts says that nofollowing links “evaporates” that PageRank rather than sending it to the remaining followed (tweeted here and it has been discussed a million times on the web already – right on Google – make SEOs and webmaster waste more time discussed topics of low impact)
  
• BING is out – the new MSN live search engine UI – old backend with nice new frontend… well – lot’s of talk, cheap schwag and a nice party here on day one of the conference… let’s wait until there’s some serious traffic being sent by them

• Google released Squared – a new kind of advanced search result type that can be useful if used right … just need to figure out how to make money off it more about it e.g. here

• some nice advanced (blackhat) PPC tactics I won’t blog about

Pros:

• met a couple friends and clients (again)
• awesome weather here in Seattle
• live session with Matt Cutts about the NOFOLLOW change, so I don’t have to depend on lots of blogged summaries BS on the web about it

• Quote of the year: Matt Cutts “I’m not supposed to be honest here”

Cons:

• super overpriced hotel group rate of $249 that you could get for $95 at hotwire.com … the SMX team is either a really bad negotiator or are ripping off attendees in addition to really high charges for the conference

• Conference price of $1400 for 1.5 conference days… COME ON! compare that to an A4Uexpo with EUR 299 for 2 full days and evenings… seriously – way more value on EU conferences… AAC conference was even free! and we had real SEO gurus like Bob Rains, Jason Duke, Joost de Valk, Dave Naylor and many other there, too… the celebrity factor is almost equal with prices being a multitude here…

• no “give it up session” this year – what a rip-off – the real USP of the SMX Advanced was replaced by a “SEO vet Q&A session” that rehashed what was literally been talked about for 1.5 days already – poor value – sorry guys, that wasn’t made up by top panel with Greg Boser, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan, etc…

• Link Building beyond the usual … hmmm … widgets something new? comeon! look at Google Cache-Dates instead of PR … COME ON! They’ve been crippled too – the cache date does NOT indicate the index date as I mentioned last month in Amsterdam… well – it might be just me being a full time link builder, but seriously I didn’t find any new approaches, not even new ideas to attain links – seems like all has been said (that is supposed to be said)

- full blog here

Summary:

I didn’t want to come initially, and I wouldn’t have taken 20 hours travel at $2k for 2 days … and I was right.
If I wouldn’t have a lot of off-air business talk (starting with the intercont flight here with Francois and Mathias) and continue to be on business for the next week in San Francisco, it wouldn’t have made any sense for me to come. So once again the conference here was just a “trigger” to meet up with people.

The conference quality went down, the networking quality was “ok” … but if we wouldn’t spend more time in the states now, going to San Francisco to meet a lot more people, I would feel bad about it.

I agree with fellow SEOs – and will focus even more on European Online Marketing conferences – the markets there, the talent is there (and better) and in addition to the business aspects, it’s way more fun to hangout in London, Amsterdam or Munich compared to e.g. Seattle where EVERYTHING closed down at 2am in the morning. I mean EVERYTHING! We couldn’t even get burgers!