Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, SEO Program Manager HP.com

I’m writing this blog while sitting in the Penalty Box Summit at SMX in Seattle – not because I have anything to say about penalties or spam but because I have some things to say about the SMX Conference and this particular track (the only organic option) isn’t all that relevant to me or HP.  Probably the most interesting take-away from this session to me is that Google took some feedback yesterday and beefed up the Google Webmaster Help Center. 

I decided to attend SMX Advanced because it is the only conference that has marketed itself as advanced.  Of course, Danny Sullivan running it helps given his reputation in the industry.  The nice thing, I’ll say right away about SMX Advanced, is that it’s only two days and there aren’t several separate tracks to choose between but rather two – PPC and SEO.  There are also a lot fewer people here but I’m not sure that’s a benefit because since there are only two tracks, about half of them I suspect are in all the SEO (organic) sessions I’m attending.  With 300+ people in the room, it makes it extremely difficult to get your questions addressed leaving me still longing for an opportunity to have a dialogue with the engines about how we can better partner to provide them insight into our site structure so they can more efficiently index our content and we can more proactively manage our web content and structure to make it more search engine friendly.

All in all I think SMX Advanced was a good conference choice had I not already attended SES in New York in April.  I went to several sessions at SES in April that had stepped up the level to more advanced and the sessions at SMX, while advanced, still left me with questions specific to a complex, global web site.  Like I mentioned, it’s not easy to get a question in and when I did I felt I needed to address one of the issues that several other sites might also be trying to address.  

There were also several repeat speakers at SMX that were at SES that I didn’t feel had additional content or ideas.  Perhaps that is intentional assuming most people don’t attend more than one conference per year, but by now, there should be enough people in the industry that you can get fresh speakers for each conference.   I do think there is a need or value to have repeat perspectives and presenece from the Engine representatives (like Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox of Google, Todd Mayer of Yahoo! Peter Linsley of Ask.com and Eytan Seidman at Live Search) because I truly felt like they were taking feedback from the audience and considering how they might be able to help us help them in the future.  But for non-engine representation, I’d like to see more new speakers with fresh content.   

The venue (Bell Harbor International Conference Center) of the conference was great.  As promised, there were a lot of power outlets and wireless everywhere.  Also everything happened at the venue (even the sponsored parties) so there wasn’t a need to find the next location and hail a cab or drive anywhere.  Another obvious difference between SMX and SES is that SMX offered breakfast and you had to walk through the expo to get there.  I was volunteering some time in the SEMPO booth first thing Tuesday morning before the sessions and I think the breakfast got people to the show early and it also got people walking through the expo at what I would guess is typically a low-traffic period during a conference. 

As far as the sessions, I did get several take-aways that I will take back to the HP.com SEO Program.  I know there are several people live-blogging all the details of the conference so I won’t go into too much detail but I did attend the entire organic track yesterday.  I’ll simply add a comment or two on each and then link to other blogs that covered each topic so you can get their detailed reviews:

You &A with Matt Cutts – this was all Q&A obviously but there were some good questions asked that Matt graciously answered.  


Duplicate Content Summit – this was pretty similar to the SES session. It was great that the engines were there and they really were looking for us to help them determine solutions to address duplicate content.  I expect to see some new developments in this area at least from Google and hopefully from the other engines as well.  

SEO, Meet SMM – this was pretty good.  I did see some new content here.  Cindy Krum, (of Blue Moon Works) in particular, offered a pretty nice presentation about SMM.  

Personalized Search: Fear or Not (I learned a quick tip here on how to turn off Personalized Web Search).  I don’t really see Personalized Search as all that threatening. I don’t think Google is using that much personal info to narrow down the results so in most cases, the user with personalized search will get the same results as anyone else.

For more coverage of SMX Advanced, check out Search Engine Round Table.  They are doing a great job reporting on the sessions.

Like I said, I would recommend the SMX Advanced conference (as well as the rest of the SMX Conference series) to intermediate and advanced search marketers with the caveat that some of the content may be repetitive from prior conferences.