London Affiliate Conference Review

Just on the train home from London Affiliate Conference today. Was a good conference. Lots of booth babes chasing wide eyes affiliates around. Always entertaining.

Really cool spectacle was the organised street dance session. If you've seen that T-Mobile Ad then you will know what I mean. If not, basically the whole of the conference floor filled with professional dancers, the PA system fired up and they all started busting a move. Random, effective, fun and great for getting attendees into the spirit of things.

Very very briefly bumped into Dave and Becky Naylor. Had a quick chat with Marcus Tandler from Creativity in Action and was asking him about SEOctoberfest. Really want to go this year as it sounds fantastic. Yes 5k is quite a lot of money for a 3 day SEO conference but that does include all accommodation, food and drink at some beautiful restaurants and I think the experience would be invaluable. Introduced myself to Andrew Girdwood (nice to meet you Andrew) and also saw my old pal Rob Kershaw from Latitude. Slightly disappointed the drinking didn’t really start until 6pm as I couldn’t be bothered to hang about, so I went back to the London office instead.

The sessions that me and my collegue Marie went to were as follows:

Social Marketing 101 - Andrew Girdwood, Bigmouthmedia

Covering some of the legal issues, Andrew was keen to point out that he is not a solicitor, none the less he offered some great advice. In summary be careful what you say on social sites, don’t speculate over peoples activities, professions or careers. Citation of the FSA was made, mainly noting that one should not offer financial advice, specifically online as its documented and so easy to use as evidence.

Andrew highlighted some great tools including the use of Brinkwire, Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader which used in combination can send you an alert of press releases and news items the second they are put live. Great for helping you become a thought leader in social media.

Somehow the topic got onto duplicate content so I asked Andrew what he thought about article spinning and markov chain technology. He said that in his opinion it didn’t really work anymore, apart from in some very specific cases. I was hoping Fantomaster might pick up on this one, but unfortunately he didn't.

Great presentation, poised and very well considered.

Demon SEO Panel - David Naylor, Bob Rains, Ziv Descalu, Frank Watson

This session was pretty much all about Black Hat SEO and stated very clearly in their heavy disclaimer at the start of the session, the type of things that you should be looking out for NOT the type of things that you should be doing!

Bit of an embargo on this session in terms of details, but I’ll give an overview. If you want details, just twitter me or email me or something. I’ll probably respond. Okay…

Top level, the topics were Click Hijacking, XSS, Taking out competitors, Spyware, Mallware and Hacking.

WordPress, unfortunately seemed to be mentioned a few times. Not that its insecure but more that people don’t know how to secure it properly. Chicken and egg perhaps, but I think if you host a website you’ve got to know about security or at least make an attempt to understand it.

Twitter was hitting the conversation notes again. Talk of the XSS stuff, if it was really cleared up properly. I have no clue on that but I'm just saying, it was mentioned by someone in the conference.

Exploiting web forms, again, not a "how to" but a be careful on your own website.

If you are into black hat or want to use black hat then make sure and use a different laptop, different Google accounts and keep everything totally separate from anything that you value.

Some great advice on preventing PPC click fraud, identifying issues with bounce rates, dropping cookies, the anatomy of a url shortener and of course how to manipulate one.

Hunting for that Golden Link - Marcus Tandler, Ralph Tegtmeier, Christoph Cemper and Sebastian Wenzel

Marcus reminded us of the days that W3C used to sell links, yes W3C! Well you made a donation and they gave you a link. His quote being that it was better than sex! Strange chap.

Don’t buy acquire links on bad neighbourhoods i.e. if all the links are about dating don’t just add your poker link in.

Remember that diversity is key. Diversity being the number of domains you are linked on.

Don’t just copy your competitors links, do better. Good tip here was asking to pay more on sites so as to feature you in the content body or in higher page relevance areas. Liked that one.

General consensus from that panel was that people over complicate link building. KISS, build up trust with a couple of killer links then diversify, aiming for a range of links from a range of domains. Keep it natural looking, don’t link stack anchor text. If I had to give someone starting out in link building some advice, these are the types of sentiments that I would echo. Link building is not a perfect science and if it were then it would look unnatural. Make sure that your links pass the smell test i.e. if they look unnatural to humans, then guess what Search Engines will probably think the same.

Big should out to my buddy and ex-colleague David Watkins who I saw spoke on one of the expert panels on Saturday. Sorry I wasn't there on Saturday to see you Dave, but if you are reading this, nice work mate, glad to see that you are doing well.

Cheers all. That’s a wrap.