Search Engine Strategies Organic Listings Forum Live from SES 2008

I have just stepped out of the Organic Listings Forum at Search Engine Strategies London 2008. On the panel were David Naylor, Ralph Tegtmeier AKA Fantomaster, Edward Cowell, Steve Johnston and legendary moderator / personality Mike Grehan. Great one hour conference session on recent trends and info in organic search marketing. I just wanted to share with you the highlights.

The sessions was a Q and A free for all, so below are the questions posed and the answers given in the order they occured.

• Yep, you've guessed it, first on the list of questions raised was links. Link buying has of course been surrounded in high profile contraversy recently and much of the discussion by the panel gravitated towards this. It appears that a good portion of the panel and the audience are absolutly 100% still buying links, much to the authors surprise, Ralph Tegtmeier imparting a gem of advice "Careful where you buy your links from". Interesting that he should mention this Surely Google don't think we are all just going to stop buying links we just have to be more careful doing it right?!
• This conversation then developed, as naturally it would, into a discussion about the rel=nofollow attribute which given David Naylors annimated rant of what a bad idea it is, we can see this is obviously an issue which is causing some annoyance. It appears that the general consensus is that you must really use nofollow on any links which you don't trust and that unless you do this your site will get flamed / downlisted in the SERPs. This really is a contradiction to Googles current business model as the more people use nofollow the less dofollow links there will be available and therefore how can Google count links as votes. Its actually not a W3C standard so why Google have departed from good sense nobody is quite sure and there was a lot of heated debate about what a bad idea nofollow is. David Naylor infact finished this topic off by saying "There are a lot of Lawyers investigating if there is a possible case against Google for punishing sites who don't use the nofollow attribute". Whether this is scare-mongering due to his recent bad experience of using dofollow who knows, but none the less the implication was made.
• A member of the audience asked about subdomain spam and if it was still possible to gain SERPS using the method. As expected the panel responded by saying that generally sub domain spam only really had a place in the blackhat side of search where seo's are interested in short term rankings to get a few extra bucks, signup or what have you.
• Conversation once again gravitated back to link buying and link detection with a question posed from the audience on how Google are detecting paid links. Generally the consesus was that there were "A lot of hand jobs going on". Take that as you wish but I am pretty sure that Ralph Tegtmeier was referring to human auditing and de-listing / devaluing of sites. Edward Cowell pointed the audience towards a site called majestic 12 or twelve which he referenced as being particularly good tool for doing link discovery either on competitors or indeed you're own website. You will have to Google for that one as I am far too scared to link to the website . No, only kidding here is the link.
• Although a specific question was not rasied, the panel often refered to link networks and elluded to many of them being still being under the radar and thus still a very good strategy for building links. If I see David Naylor in a second I shall go and ask him if he has any advice on any which might be recomended and let you all know. I'll post an update if I get that info.
• Interestingly on the topic of link buying some rather dodgey under-handed subjects were mentioned and specific large blue chip companies were mentioned. Sorry but I can't go into too much detail on that here as I really can't aford to deal with any legal backlash from the blood sucking corporates.

Okay, I think thats all for now. Some good info there for you all I hope.