Pubcon 2007 Nuggets

I skipped a lot of Pubcon sessions this year, either because I was working on my presentation, or because there just wasn’t anything appealing to me at the moment. I did take notes during many of the sessions, but since I always keep my Blackberry on my hip, I also try to write down and remember the really good things I overhear in passing.

There are plenty of good session roundups out there so nobody needs me to rehash the conference like I did for SES Local.

I took a lot of session notes as always, but these are a few items that I found either interesting, noteworthy or amusing, so I also took the time to type into my Blackberry, and I thought I’d share them here.

(Unless I use quotes, then I’m paraphrasing what each person said.)

Matt Cutts -
1. “If you do everything on Word press, you’re pretty much covered for SEO”. Did you hear that, all of you Fortune 500 companies who think you’re far too sophisticated to use a free software program?

2. Recommended a decrease of server IP TTL (Time To Live) to 5 minutes at least a couple of days before you move your domain to a different IP address. While that may be a no-brainer to some, I certainly hadn’t thought of it

3. Google is changing the way they treat subdomains -

Read Matt’s explanation, and not just the interpretations of others)

4. Use Alt Text for images and get “pretty good” credit for the link.

Well well, looks like I’m vindicated… my regular readers may know why.

Greg Boser -
Geg sad, “The Long tail is a myth perpetuated by SEO’s that suck”, and he called PPC advertising, “Checkbook SEO” - hilarious

Alexander Barbara -
“To avoid the Digg effect (crashing your server when a story hits the home page), make sure your article is up at least a week before you submit it to Digg, and gets cached by Google.”

Then, when your story is nearing the Digg homepage, do a 302 to the Google cache for a couple of days until the traffic dies down “.

(Oh my gosh, this was fantastic. You should’ve seen the look on a couple of Google employees faces when Alex shared this tip.)

Rand Fishkin -
1. I read Aaron Walls blog every day. Pay attention to what Aaron Wall says” [sic] no matter what he looks like!
(Wow. That was supposed to be a compliment, and although it came out poorly, I’ve still taken it to heart and added Aaron to my own blogroll.)

2. “Doubling your conversion rate is easier than doubling your traffic.”

Since I’d heard that before, this wasn’t exactly like a “lightbulb going on”, but it WAS like a “lightbulb being replaced”, since I hadn’t been in that mindset lately, and it’s already made a difference in the 7 days since the conference..

Todd Malicoat -
To combat content scrapers, Todd said to “Cloak text links into your RSS feed”. I thought this was ingenious, but as I was writing it down, Matt Cutts laughed and said “Better be careful doing that”…

I can see no downside. I’d like to know what Matt meant…

Roger Montti - Martinibuster
1. When you’re looking for domains/sites/blogs to purchase, look for ones with Adsense below the fold. This is usually an indicator that monetezation efforts are not going so well.

2. Try using olive oil and chicken bullion for seasoning steaks before cooking.

Awesome. Who’da thunk it? Chicken bullion for seasoning beef?
For me this year, the Las Vegas show was my first Pubcon presentation, and I was a bit nervous. Fortunately (or unfortunately) my session was less crowded than my presentation from last year’s Searchfest, and it went off without a hitch. As soon as it was over, I felt like a big weight was lifted off my shoulders, and I was able to have some fun.

Enough about Pubcon - Now we’re less than 90 days from Oregon’s largest search marketing event, there’s a whole new crop of things to focus on. The whole board of SEMpdx is working hard to make it great, and we’ll be having two SEM Hotseat events leading up to it.