Today saw the Brighton Dome filled with over 1,000 SEOs from all over the country and as far afield as America and Thailand for BrightonSEO 2012.

Read our massively comprehensive write up of the day which we had to split into five posts:

• ‘Ask the Engines’ Panel (This one!)
• Brighton SEO Morning Session
• Brighton SEO Afternoon Session
• Brighton SEO 20×20 Presentations
• Author Rank: More Important than Panda (James Carson Write Up)

For each session we’ve highlighted our top 5 takeaways from every talk.

We caught the whole panel on video and have uploaded it for those of you who missed the day or want to watch it again. It’s long at 40 minutes but we thoroughly recommend it for any SEOs who want an insight into what the search engines are planning:

In honour of the event, Brighton pier has been used as the background for Bing today. This shows how far BrightonSEO has come from a room above a pub so kudos to Kelvin for that!

First up was the discussion panel, a chance to ‘ask the search engines’. This was a chance for SEOs to direct their questions directly at Google (Pierre Far) and Bing (Dave Coplin) and find out what they really think. Representing the search industry itself were freelancer Rishi Lakhani and Martin MacDonald.

If you want to learn more about SEO or train up your staff to understand it better then you should take a look at our SEO package deals. As shown in this post, SEO isn’t enough for rankings these days and your content and social strategies are just as important. Combine SEO training, Social Media training, Content Marketing training and Google Analytics training for 5 days of SEO insight and a great discount!

BrightonSEO 2012 Discussion Panel – Ask the Search Engines

Is SEO Dead?

Wow, a big question to start, and the response was passionate. Google’s Pierre Far provided one of the big sound bites of the day with his first sentence – ‘SEO will never die. It will evolve but will never die.’ The SEO industry can breathe a collective sigh of relief – Google are not planning to kill SEO and believe that SEOs will always have a place on the internet  – at least that’s their public opinion.

Bing’s Dave Coplin was similarly dramatic, comparing SEOs to magicians (how fantastic that the morning session finished with a performance from a magician!) Dave claims that SEOs have knowledge and skills that are alien to the world, and for SEO to survive it must adapt to new technology and stay ahead of the game so that no point can somebody say ‘oh SEO, that’s easy’.

Rishi Lakhani and Martin McDonald both queried exactly what SEO is and whether the term is even relevant anymore. Rishi pointed to the fact that the SEO industry has no qualifications, no examining body, no standard practice and so is not a formally recognised industry – something it needs to be to survive.

The problem with this was evident in the question – by the time standards have been set, SEO practice has moved on. There is no way that we could offer the same SEO course now as we did a year ago – everything is always changing.

Martin McDonald used mobile technology to show that technology drives SEO – for example ranking mobile apps in app stores. As users start to search using spheres other than traditional Google desktop search (mobile search, product comparison search, games console search and social search are all growing industries).

What we can take away from this question is that SEOs must pay attention to new products and new technologies. After all, the job of an SEO is to make a product or brand as searchable as possible. Currently that means high rankings in Google, but as Google splits its products and different methods of search become more dominant, SEOs will need to develop a more broad ‘inbound marketing’ approach.

What Should You Do If You Are Manually Penalised for Bad Links?

This question was aimed mostly at Google and provides some good advice for Webmasters but nothing they shouldn’t already know.

If your site is manually punished for bad links then the advice is to do your best to fix those  bad links:

Contact Webmasters who are linking to your site and ask them to remove the links.

Google will see the links that have been removed but it is highly likely that the majority of requests will be ignored. In these cases keep track of your correspondence with other Webmasters so that Google knows you are genuinely trying to fix your bad links. According to Pierre, they are nice enough to relist your site if you actively fix your mistakes.

Both Martin and Rishi were quick to point out that almost every SEO buys a lot of links and it is still the only way to be competitive in the search market – although both denied every doing it themselves of course. I think the point they were getting at was that it’s a bit unfair if Google penalises one site out of twenty that are all doing the same thing.

Pierre countered by repeating the mantra that paid links are against Webmaster guidelines and advised everyone in the room to go and read them. Pierre states that there are around 200 ranking factors and linking is just one, if a site is doing well for 196 factors but not linking then they will still do well. Or at least this is something that is happening more and more recently.

So What Is Replacing Link Factors?

The unanimous response was social. Dave turned directly to the audience and said ‘Be bloody good at social.’

When asked what he meant by social, Dave said ‘Twitter and Facebook’.  No Google+ then, although it is clearly an important factor for Google still.

Pierre then broke Google’s algorithm down into two factors: What does the user want, and did they get it?

And what is it that users want? Great content. Not just text but video, images and apps. So does that mean rich media ranks well?

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a ranking factor!”

Clearly, this statement from Google didn’t go down well with the 1000 people in the room who rely on ranking factors to make a living.

Unfortunately this is very much the hardline Google view at the moment. Webmasters should be concentrating on creating and sharing great content and not worrying about ranking factors. Create great content and it will get shared and linked to – leading to higher rankings.

Rishi agreed. Debate about how powerful paid links aside, he advised creating high quality, shareable content; “Good content for search engines, is content that can be read by search engines. Will somebody want to read that content and pass it along? The more people who share these resources the better you’ll rank.” He claims the focus for SEOs should focus on how they share their content. This would solve the problem with creating content that nobody engages with.

Unfortunately, all SEO techniques are subject to abuse. Just as natural link building is obscured by paid links, how do Google and Bing feel about paid likes and +1s?

What is a Good Social Signal and What is a Bad Social Signal?

The obvious temptation for SEO’s looking to exploit social signals is to pay for fans and like. A quick search tells me that 2,000 Facebook fans costs you $100 – not very much then.

Social Media specialists will tell you that buying 2,000 fans has almost no positive impact on your social media marketing as those followers won’t engage with you and will probably leave. So there’s the other way to gain an increase in followers – promotions: “Follow us on Twitter and win an iPad” etc. Again, how many of these people are actually interested in your brand and how many just want a free iPad. How do you keep them as fans after the competition has closed? And if there is no social value then is there any search value?

Well, both Pierre and Dave state that number of followers is just one of many factors that also include speed of sharing and reach of sharing. This means there is more value in sharing good content to a strong follower base (who will then share your content to their followers who will share it themselves if it’s good enough) than simply buying large numbers of followers who you can’t engage with. It might be an impressive figure but it won’t help you in any way.

Once again, Pierre sums it up with another Google sound bite: “social sharing will happen naturally if you create good content.”

Why Do Google Hide Search Queries? They Must Really Hate SEOs!

This is very much an ongoing debate that we have covered in the past. Combined with Search Plus Your World, hiding search queries in Analytics (the dreaded (not provided) result) has really turned the SEO community against Google in the last six months and led to some heated debate on the couches.

The defensive position from Pierre was that SSL search is to protect user privacy and anyway, webmasters can see query data in Webmaster Tools. The reply from SEO?

“That’s rubbish.”

Rishi and Martin joined forces to denounce Webmaster Tools as a reliable method of gaining insight into search query data. It is certainly true that Webmaster Tools is nowhere near as reliable as Google Analytics used to be, so why hide the data?

It is all social search’s fault. Google’s view is that users logged into Google (and so using S+YW by default) are more likely to use personal search terms, and so they want to keep those private from Webmasters. Martin effectively countered this by pointing to the fact that more than 99% of web users have no idea that if they click a natural results their query is hidden and if they click an ad it isn’t. Most of them won’t even be aware that website owners can monitor that sort of thing.

The general consensus from the room was that Pierre was talking nonsense and that Google has no intention of increasing user privacy. Amazingly, Bing then defended Google. Dave was one of a handful of people who said they believed that Google SSL is because of user privacy, and then briefly spoke about the importance of online privacy and how it isn’t discussed enough. This subject certainly has more scope to it and I am sure it will be a hot talking point on the pier tonight!

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ask the search engines, brighton SEO, brightonseo, brightonseo 2012, brightonseo discussion panel, dave coplin, kelvin newman, link penalties, martin macdonald, pierre far, ranking factors, Rishi Lakhani, search queries, SEO, seo conference, social sharing, ssl search

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