The Las Vegas air was waiting for thousands of search marketers to fill its void. And we did. This was my first PubCon attendance, and although much of the information presented would be valuable to most noveau-seo, I would have to say that much of what I heard here could be learned with a little trial and error and elbow grease (which I’ve always said is the best way to learn).

But what was good about this conference? In my opinion, we now have some definitive statements from the guys at the search engines themselves - things that don’t trick the engines, but will dramatically increase our rankings.  And most of the time, a few minutes of a code tweak can mean a world of difference in ranking.

Good

• I think Matt Cutts lost some weight. Thoughts?
• In the duplicate content session, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all weighed in on some easy and quick ways to eliminate duplicate content confusion. Central point here was mainly comprised of two things: 1. Avoid parameters and session ID’s. Engineers may love ‘em, but this is where you - as an SEO - need to step forward and say, “NO! I will not take this kind of abuse.” Instead, says the search gurus, you should try to track your visits through cookies, and 2.)Take the extra two minutes it takes to do your www. to non-www. redirect (or vice-versa). I mean, really? Why do people not do this from Day 1 of launch?

• Paid links. Do they work? Are they legit? This was, by far, the most heavily attended session of the conference. I’d like to think it’s because most people want to know what NOT to do, but somehow, I don’t think it was the case. SeoBook’s Aaron Wall gave some pointers on how to campaign for links without directly “paying” someone for the link, as did SEOMoz’s Rand and John Lessnau from LinkAdage. I especially found Aaron and Rand’s advice to be helpful. Among the things mentioned were charity donations, article syndication, widgets, contests, and site acquisition (I got the sense that this was mostly for the links, rather than the site itself).

Bad

• Don’t submit a site with paid links to the site review session whose panel contains Matt Cutts. I think a few sites (I won’t mention any names) made that fatal mistake, despite the fact that Matt’s computer was mysteriously inoperable. (by the way, does anyone know what tools he uses. I would pay a fortune to know and/or receive the .exe files for them).
• I got the sense that a few PubCon attendees saw the conference as a springboard to promote themselves. Besides the fact that this is a conference for SEOs ( who generally don’t purchase Widget A from Site Alpha), I didn’t see any reason why some site reviews had people expounding on the infinite virtues of their products. Let’s hear how you got all those links for a change. 

The Ugly

• How do you get 5 million+ unique visitors a month with such an ugly site.
• Why does it cost $14.95 to get to the top of the Stratosphere?