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!

It was great to meet a lot of friends, client and partners again and I especially valued meeting those clients I’ve been working with for years but never had the chance to meet.

As you can see below we had quite some drinks

Sad thing is that I had a super early flight back home as I wasn’t up to date with the next day event schedule and I even slept over it. Long story short, there were no flights back to Vienna and I had to take the traing for frickin 9 hour travel time… oh well – Hannover isn’t exactly the big international city.

Anyways, it was great!

Here’s a rundown of the frickin coolest quotes, pics and videos from Amsterdam last week!

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10. Newspapers are the new Blackhats in 2009

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9. Can I get A Free Hug?

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated * by Bob Rains who later “got thrown out” of the red light district later by some crusty old man with a torch who pretended to be the Amsterdam redlight authority LOL

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8. I was BOB’ed last night!

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7. Don’t bring a Sword to a Gunfight

quoting Tim Mayer of Yahoo, meaning that in some industries you HAVE to do paid links, spamming, etc. cause everyone does …

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6. REAL users don’t care about Anchortext, Nofollow or Page Rank at all

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5. You Can’t get Lunch here – that’s a Dinner table

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4. This will become the new summer style fashion …

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3. We could talk about SEO all day, but it comes down to one thing…

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2. Here’s your two chips…

Which company would you like to affiliate with?
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1. FUCK Inspiration GET LINKS!

See for yourself!

Any cool quotes I missed? Let me know!

Matthew Wood and his team did an awesome job putting together a conference with really inspiring talks, motivated and enthusiastic crowd and great sponsors for the party. Seriously, Matt’s conference really stands out of the mass of other conferences where they charge a multitude and are not even capable of bringing the conference folks together for serious networking all days and nights.

My presentation was great fun and I got awesome feedback and roughly 100 business cards from people to take advantage of the secret goodie (free early bird access to our link juice tool).

Other awesome sessions (as expected) where

Yoast’s WordPress SEO - 40 tips in 40 minutes (get the slides! gold!)
Extreme SEO (checkout THIS quote )

We’re heading for Amsterdam’s queens day now and then the warmup event for the AAC - Amsterdam Affiliate Conference

TODO: still need to share my presentation with you – checking out Slideshare ASAP

And here’s the link building presentation slides

TODO2: there’s some media coverage of my presentation already – need to check them all

Nina Baumann & Christoph C. Cemper at a4uexpo 2009 in Amsterdam

Sascha Böge, Ralf Schwöbel, Christoph C. Cemper, Andreas @mediadonis, Saksia

a ton more photos can obviously be found on Facebook, so add me there

I’m looking forward to meeting all you guys, tons of friends and partners in the industry – and Mathew Wood and his team really put together an awesome schedule for both the conference and the parties… starting with the classic warmup Ignite Party on day 0 the other two days got parties and even a sponsored even during the Queens Day celebration. Queensday is  Hollands biggest bank holiday, and those celebrations alone will be fun and worth the travel.

I’m also speaking on advanced link building in 2009 at day 2 and look forward to that as well. Instead of packing my stuff I just went over the presentation again, tested and tuned our “giveaway”, etc… that’ll be fun

Some nuggets you’ll hear in my Advanced Link Building presentation on Wednesday 29th

• what DID work

• what DOES work

• the 7 golden rules of white hat link building

• how to search and aquire great links

• what actually makes up a “great” link

• ONLY delegates in my presentation will get free access to our internal JUICE tool

• a peek behind our curtains and more internal SEO and link building tools we built

Quality links have been important for years and will remain to do so, so with years in the industry I decided to talk live about what and how we work.
There’s actually a lot of other TOP NOTCH seo speakers at the conference, and I feel honored to be co-cited by Matthew Wood of a4u along such big guy names as Dave Naylor, Dixon Jones, Joost de Valk which I know very well from the past years of conferencing.

The whole A4U conference brochure is 127 pages thick to describe 2 days with 4 awesome parallel tracks (just take a look!! SMX and SES should take a look def. – Matt’s Team doing a better job since 2007!)

Also I found this 2 page-overview PDF from SEOxplorer which should come in handy too…

Well, and right after the A4U I’m staying four more days for the AAC conference, so that travel combines pretty well!

Looking forward to meeting all you guys tomorrow!

Update – the slides of my A4U presentation can be found in the A4Uexpo recap post

The FOUND conference by O’reilly has been cancelled – erhm – postponed

Due to the challenging economic environment, we’re sorry to announce that we’ve made the difficult business decision to postpone the O’Reilly Found Conference

However some cool old-school SEOs that were supposed to speak there are organizing an alternative conference in a barcamp style for 2 days,

on Jun 10, which might be pretty cool – small group, high top-expert to expert ratio, etc.etc. I’m in and just extended the plans for our SEO roadtrip begin of June

Speaking of SEO roadtrip, we’re a bunch of cool online marketeers heading to SMX advanced begin of June, then an affiliate barcamp in Vancouver to end with this Found Alternative. Now with that kind of agenda it’s bearable for me to spend 20hours trip time to Seattle

Here’s am updated schedule of where I’ll hang out and/or speak in the next months

Now that the really awesome Seo De Janeiro in Rio, Seo Campixx in Berlin and SES in NYC are over,

I thought it’s time to update my event schedule for the next weeks… Looking forward to you meet you

on any of these conferences!

The two top things I’m looking forward to most at the moment is my speaking engangement in Amsterdam

and our SEO Roadtrip which will be a trip with some top notch SEOs to combine the SMX advanced in Seattle, an affiliate bar camp in Vancouver/.ca A TON OF FUN on a luxury RV, some sailing, a beach house on the west coast, and of course the FOUND Alternative conference in San Francisco.

Rio / Brazil	SEO de Janeiro	Feb 18-27	The frickin best event the whole industry talks about read more and only 16 days left
Berlin	SEO Campixx	Mar 6-7	more a BarCamp - looking forward to meeting a lot of german friends and clients – not been to Berlin for 5 years or so!
New York City	SES NYC	Mar 21-27	after two years I decided I have to add New York to my schedule again – after all I met so many great guys in 2007 there that I just can’t miss out again this year again! Looking forward to see you all there, especially at the great IM Charity Party of Todd Malicoat & co
Munich	SMX Munich	April 22-23	a must do event – might even speak there – Rand Fishkin is going to do the keynote …
Amsterdam	A4U EXPO Europe	April 27-28	The best european conference for sure, since the start in 2007 Matt did an awesome job putting this show together! I’m going to speak on advanced linkbuilding and how to find and get those real juicy links in 2009, reveal some of our internal tools and methods… This will be the first time ever I speak on a conference in the online marketing world and SEO scene, altough I did already speak in my last career in IT …
Amsterdam	Amsterdam Affiliate Conference	April 30-May3	The iGaming conference is something relatively new to me but there are a lot of clients, partners, fellow SEOs there, also speaking, so I HAVE to see it (and it’s a perfect match with the A4U and QueensDay in Holland!
Hannover	SEOSEO	May 15	but only for Networking
Seattle	SMX Advanced	Jun 2-3	The classic SMX Advanced and I’m getting there, since we combine this with the SEO Road Trip with a bunch of other cool guys anyway. SMX did drop the “give it up panel” this year, which was THE main selling point for many – so this might really be the last time for a lot people visiting rainy ugly Seattle there (does anyone really like that place?)
Toronto	SES Toronto	Jun 8-10	The SES Torontoe would be a favorite show to visit, especially since I’ve never been to Toronto before to meetup with local marketers. Unfortunately I can’t go there, despite an invite I got in favor of the O’Reilly Found, now Found Alternative Conference
San Francisco	Found Alternative	Jun 10-11	After O’reilly cancelled the original FOUND confernece, some cool old-school SEOs that were supposed to speak there are doing an alternative conference in a barcamp style for Jun 10. It’s a must-be-there because of the small group IMHO
London	Pubcon	Jul 4	Classic PubCon in London
Budapest	Budapest Affiliate Conference	Sep 10-13	I will be speaking at the Budapest Affiliate Conference on Friday, September 11, on 13:30. Have a look at the other SEO and affiliate experts that will speak during the event and the Q&A site about me.
Munich	SEOktoberfest	Sep 21-25
London	a4uexpo London	Oct 12-14
London	SEOMoz Pro Training	Oct 19-20	At the moment it is not sure if I will be speaking at the event.
Berlin	SES Berlin	Nov 23-25	I will be speaking at the event in Berlin and there will also be a link building training day.

In short, no big surprises – the agenda was published ahead of time, and only very few SEO & Linkbuilding sessions were planned for at all. This means all the “usual” high profile SEOs like Greg Boser, Todd Malicoat, Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin, etc. are missing here. I mean literally ALL are missing. Not even not speaking, but also not even here for the networking.

• FACEBOOK – ok, FB is big, and has a lot of potential for targetting ads, but their cheesy booth and the even chessier presentation called “optimizing FB ads for the social graph” was a joke. Literally they had this two college girls out there in front of 3000 people and showed us how to use the self service ad booking form. COME ON! I’m sure NOBODY - nobody – paid 2 grands (over $2000 conference attendee fee here!) to hear this basic crap. Then facebook has a booth with some logos put up and again some cute college chicks. This appears to be the only reason why the booth was so packed with people…

• TWITTER – ok, Twitter is big too, growing exponentially, all sorts of rumours of Google or M$ or some other biggie buying Twitter, and most of all, a great “how to spam Twitter”-Keynote by Guy Kawasaki, who was brilliant yesterday – quote: “If they do it to me, it’s spam, but if I do it, it’s brilliant marketing”… controversial attitude and the right answer “UFM” (you f*ckin moron, or in nice-speak on the panel: Lisa “Un Follow Me” if you don’t like my spam…) Guy gave away some nice tips to and tools that he uses to automate building his twitter account and most impressive, some random crap link about peanut butter stuff he tweeted was clicked on by 200+ people in the next minute or so…

I might be totally wrong, but the overall audience here has become even more corporate, even more agency crowd, even more distanced from the “technical internet marketing” that SEO and affiliate marketing is so much about…

So as expected and once again, the networking and meeting of new or old friends is the REAL value for me here. It once again shows that some talk inbetween the sessions is worth a lot more than a whole presentation made for the masses. We had great dinner at the Spice Market on Monday, have been to awesome russian restaurant and that’s what I believe is the value of the conference for me – and a lot others.

There’s yet another conference day tomorrow, but the expo has already shut down today. I heard from some exhibiting companies that the interest in their product was pretty good (200+ leads) and I’ve seen the expo hall packed all the time. Looking forward to get some insights on how those leads convert.

If you’re interested in reading more details, make sure you follow me on twitter.com/cemper or checkout the pics uploaded to my facebook profile

This was the fifth time I was here in Vegas, and it only gets better every time.

BUT, this doesn’t refer to the broken WIFI at the pubcon (those ads-dudes sponsored 100, then 200 wifi slots for suppesdly 2000 attendees)… what is an internet marketing conference where folks are cut off from the internet for days, or have to go back quickly to their room to check emails at the almost as broken WIFI of the hotel? Conferences like the SES in August or the A4U in October did a way better job in this matter.

Anyway, after hitting the hotel at 0:30 (did some extra sightseeing via LA thanks to delay when flying into Washintong from Europe) I just wanted to grab a beer from the non-existant fridge, so I found myself at the bar til 3:30 …

This happened because the Breeze bar here at the TI was already packed with many of my SEO friends like Greg Boser , Mediadonis , Ralf Schwoebel , Todd Malicoat , Lauren Vacarello , Matt Reider, Bob Rains , Avi Wilensky , Chris Winfield , Neil Patel , Eric Enge , Todd Friesen and so many more I could already talk to so early, tough after 28 hours flight I was a bit dizzy then …

I even met Shoemoney on day 3 as he flew in last minute to attend the parties… and altough we could only talk for a short while I got a coupon code for this shoemoney tools that gives you $19.95 signup and a recurring rate of $ 79.95 afterwards… want it? just let me know!

This kicked of the networking week in a perfect manner – and I found myself to only attend the keynotes and most sessions of the 3rd day which was focused mostly on link building, link buying and thelike.

It was great to be able to meet and talk to a lot of new guys at the PubCon,
including

• Stephan Spencer
• Dixon Jones
• Sam Allock
• Michael Geneles
• Todd Keup
• Christopher Johnson
• Jordan Kasteller
• Brian S. Ree
• Abe Kurien
• Richard Farr
• Darwin Hall

And I had exceptionally lots of fun with Michael , Matt, Chris, Bastian , Francois and Monte again!

I missed Jim Boykin and Dave Naylor as I thought they would be coming in, at least for the poker sessions, but at least I met Aaron Wall again at a conference (was good seeing you, enjoying your presentation Aaron) and Rand Fishkin whom I could barter some more beta-testing deals for his linkscape API with! Looking forward to that!

Cheers to all of you!

This year has been the year of tools – everybody’s launching new tools and promoting them – so in addition to what I already wanted to look into I now got a pretty long “shortlist” of tools to evaluate and integrate into our private toolkit like

• ShoeMoney’s Tools
• Sistrix toolkit
• SeoMoz’s linkscape (been working with that, but looking forward to our API integration)
• Majestic SEO tool (been offered about giving those a try, will see if they can do API integration as well)
• Search Metrics

So, as always after the conferences, my head is full of ideas and insights for improving our services and the way we work for our clients …

In fact I already planned some important conference calls with major clients next week about insights of this week…

Tonight I’m gonna see KA at the MGM the 3rd time – an awesome show – and finally head home then…

It’s been a great week – and I’m looking forward to the next conferences, which will be the London EuroCap in January, the SMX West and the PubCon in Texas in March – followed by the New York SES in April …

Well – attending 3-4 conferences a year ONLY makes sense for networking, especially if you’re up to date and work 24/7 in online marketing anyway.

So while there’ve been PLENTY of talk and blogposts about the SES and it’s sessions on the web now, the most valuable nuggets of information I got came from all those off with SEO rockstars like

• Jim Boykin (congrats Jim on your success again, you got a great team – cheers to all Ninjas and thanks!)
• Greg Boser (thanks Greg for all the time and insights)
• Dave Naylor (this was SUPER-INTENSE content, every sentence like gold, no fluff, just facts – thanks Dave!)
• Shoemoney (had fun at dinner! and love the USE ME t-shirt pic man!)
• Neil Patel (wow, didn’t know you work so much into Europe – and thanks for the dinner dude)
• Loren Baker
• Chris Winfield (nice to meet you Chris)
• Lauren Vacarello (was great meeting you again Lauren – I enjoyed the chat we had)
• Dave Davies (thanks for sharing your consulting experience with me)
• Todd Malicoat (awesome party! actually the ONLY real party – in European standards… or what is an open bar that closes after your first drink… LOL)
• Tim Ash (loved the website optimizer session – and congrats on your recent successes you told me about – looking forward to … )
• Aaron Wall (was nice to meet you and your wife at the party the first night)
• Bob Rains (wow, I was puzzled to hear your Malta story… but great move BTW! and thanks for the awesome dinner, too!)
• many more include Avi Wilensky and his great sister Sheara, Becky Ryan, Pascal, Mediadonis, “Chris Boggs”, Jens, Marc, Tim, etc…

But that wasn’t it all …

I even met so many new great guys that I’ve a hard time keeping up to follow up with all of them via Mail, LinkedIn, Xing … just got my inbox down to 289 unread today, so I thought it’s time for this post

Cheers and a link shoutout to

• Francois – man you rock – had a brilliant time w you and Monte, looking forward to work with you for some time to come – and see you in Vegas
• Lydia – was great meeting you Lydia, I found it pretty interesting that you are yet another US SEO to work into Europe… time to pay a lot more attention to the markets over here I guess
• the Playboy team
• sooo many german SEOs and sailors like Jens, Marc, Andreas, Axel (need to dig up those linkbacks) – awesome to find we share a hobby… remember our plans?
• David funny how we met finally so long after the last session – thanks for sharing so much details as well

I took quite a couple nice shots, but I’ll try keep up even more with my mails now as I’m off for sailing next week,
and I still got more interviews coming up tomorrow…

Interest in our persona links was massive… even stronger than after the SMX in Seattle… to bad we’re booked out until October…

So this week I already hired two new linkbuilders for our persona building service and will interview many more til Friday. Based on the maths I did I also had to increase prices a bit to maintain our quality – since we also started to increase the work and time we spend with each persona …

but you know, if you spend money on time to build good personas, it’s worth every penny…
after all you want NATURAL looking personas, for relevant and NATURAL looking links…

Cheers!