Late Tuesday night (tonight) at Pubcon was the open forum with the main public figures from each of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. This was moderated by Guy Kawasaki (one of the best speakers I have had the pleasure of learning from!).
So, what was learned from this forum……well:
Google (Cutts) is very defensive about their position on user feedback about their organic search results. It is clear they are not only relying on their algorithms to determine results, but also on user feedback.
Although Guy was very persistent on getting “fact of the matter” answers from the forum panel such as how to rank, what is PageRank, and “what would you do if” there was a lot of dodging and little new information except the old stand by of building relative content (including blogs) and gaining on topic links.
So what did we really learn about internet marketing in general?
If you want to learn the secrets to search engine rankings, ask those who do it, not those who represent the companies who make the search money.
FYI…one tidbit that we all paid attention to was….mod rewritten urls are important. I’ll paraphrase Matt Cutts; “Everything else being equal, a page with keywords within the url is better off then a url with ambiguous numbers”.