You may have noticed that a week ago many State of Search bloggers were present at one or more of the search events taking place in the UK. They were either speaking or blogging there.
A lot of great content was produced around the events International Search Summit, SMX London and SASCON. Maybe you missed some of it. Not to worry though, you can find an overview of everything written about the events below! (more…)
This is a guest post (interview) by Andy Betts, a freelance consultant for many search and digital technology startups, agencies, and direct advertisers on sales and marketing, products and technology. Like this post? Let us know!
I had the pleasure of meeting Mike King last week at SMX London to talk through his thoughts on the SEO space and the future of SEO. For those who don’t know Mike, you should! Mike has a done a lot for the SEO community of the last year. Just take a look at this for an example;
However, before I share the transcript of our chat I wanted to update you issue that happened last week. Danny Sullivan, once again, produced a great overview of the topic here and I know the equally awesome Bas van den Beld is soon to share his thoughts too here on State of Search.
Personally – I do not want to draw too much light on the original author or post. I don’t like outing or baiting. What’s more I think it’s important not to make personal assumptions about people on something that may/may not have happened before they joined?
I totally agree with Danny comment below on my interviewee.
“He’s sharp, has lots of insight, and he seemed a win for iAcquire when they hired him about two months ago”
1. You seem to have been given a bit of a hard time over the last few days? Many people, despite all the good community spirit, seem to have been outing and posting negative after negative. Firstly, what’s your take on events (bearing in mind you have been in your new role for only a few months)?
“Yeah, there was a lot of half-cocked hate being thrown my way. It seemed like certain people were just waiting to be able to say something about me. That’s a shame especially seeing that I’ve done a lot for the community in the last year. Not sure I really need to defend myself, but I especially thank all the awesome people that have showed their support. It’s clear that level-headed people know my work is white hat and I joined this organization to engage in white hat practices, improve processes and grow the agency. But for those that are unclear, let me be clear that I’ve never bought or sold a link ever in my life, nor do I support the practice. What I myself do and encourage are the strategies and tactics that I have championed throughout my career both in and out of the spotlight. Have I failed in the past? Hell yes, but for better or worse, that’s just not what I do.”
2. How do we solve this? Does it need to solved?
“Simple. Everybody should just stop talking and get back to work. If it’s not of value to anyone, don’t involve me in it and don’t talk to me about it.”
3. Does this help people’s perceptions of SEO?
“Not at all. The only winner after a situation like this is Google. I bet Matt Cutts was sitting in the Googleplex enjoying how he has manipulated us into doing his job. Here’s my thing Google is not the law. Google does not own the internet. I do “white hat” stuff because I like having lasting results, but beyond that I couldn’t care less about Google and their made up rules that only benefit them. Google can’t dictate what’s morally correct when they are stealing intellectual property and invading people’s privacy. The in fighting in the community is not useful either whether it be over black hat/white hat, seo/inbound marketing, or whatever. So leave me out of all that. I’m just going to be over here doing what it is I do to move things forward. “
1. Great to see you again here in the UK Mike. What’s brought you here?
“Hey Andy, yeah it’s crazy seeing people I met in another place on the other side of the world. I’m back in London again here to speak at SMX on the tools panel with a bunch of smart people.”
2. What excites you the most about this industry? What makes you rage?
“The people in the SEO community are generally pretty awesome.
I love the people in this industry, they are far more generous and such than people in other industries that I’ve been a part of. For example, the music industry is nothing like this. What I specifically enjoy is how there’s no one set path to being an SEO and therefore everyone comes with very interesting life stories. I love the camaraderie. I love making new friends; I’m having a ton of fun.
What I specifically don’t like is how so many people offer conjecture as though it were fact. I also don’t like how we get stuck in a rut of having the same arguments over and over i.e. “inbound vs. SEO,” “is SEO dead?” “are links dead?,” “black hat vs. white hat” and the like. I also don’t like how so many people will essentially reword someone else’s post and then don’t cite the source. That really enrages me, but that is probably more a leftover hip-hop thing for me – it seems like everyone else is generally ok with idea theft.”
3. We are in a period of change in the SEO industry – what do people need to do to adapt to this change
“Well that’s the beauty of it, in SEO we are always inherently in a period of change. Really, the question is what change are you focusing on?
Right now Search and Social are rapidly converging and a lot of people want to ignore that and keep doing what they’ve been doing since 2008. Organic Search specifically is being called to grow up and sit at the adult table to do things like influence product decisions and drive digital strategies, but again a lot of people just don’t want to be responsible for that.
There’s a saying that once the rate of change outside of your organization is more than the rate of change inside your organization – the end is near.
So in light of what Google is forcing us to adapt to, what the overall digital community is forcing us to adapt to and what we as an industry are changing, the search marketers that don’t embrace change have a fast approaching expiration date.”
4. Tell me a little more about your new role and the title ‘inbound marketing’ – that’s your specialty so tell me more about why you are so passionate about this
“Well, really, me taking the title Director of Inbound Marketing is more me planting a flag as to where I stand in this argument. As a strong proponent with a voice in this industry, I like that I can help shape the perception of something new. However in actuality my role at iAcquire is Marketing Director for our brand because I control paid channels too, but as we grow I’ll be doing more client-facing work and running inbound marketing teams.
What I specifically love about Inbound Marketing is that most clients don’t really know what it is so you have a clean slate to explain it. Once you break it down, it’s clear that you need to have a large amount of control to complete your tasks. It’s clear that I need to influence strategy across a whole ecosystem whereas the way that people understand SEO they just assume I’m playing with meta tags and redirects and content is considered optional.”
5. How would you sum up inbound marketing and SEO (maybe a rap is on the way?)
“HA! I am not the SEO rapper! Inbound Marketing is the opportunity to educate and entertain your way into conversions through content strategy across free traffic channels. SEO is a portion of inbound marketing and generally focuses on and off page optimization, but as I see it definitely includes social media and content strategy as well. There’s a very fine line between the two, but I’d say that SEO uses other channels as tactics whereas inbound marketing using them as strategies.”
6.Have you seen any differences in US and UK marketing approaches to search and inbound marketing
“Yeah, in the UK they spell optimize with an S.”
7. The phrase ‘inbound’ gets a lot of stick – what’s your response? (the minute its mentioned people jump on it, say its commercial/hubspot/hype)
“I don’t really care. In general I think all of the arguments in our industry are a waste of time and I just want to do great work. I’m an inbound marketer and I actually do work in the real world, most of the people arguing about this haven’t actually gotten anything ranked outside of an SEO term in the last 4 years so they can’t relate to what people actually do the work go through. If you don’t want to be called an inbound marketer, don’t, stop talking and get back to work.”
8. Can you draw some parallels to your passion in music and your passion for the industry
“Sure, I’ve always strived to be really good at anything I do. I take pride in my work and push things forward. For example, I’m the first person to ever do the freestyle object guessing game blindfolded. I’m the first person (and still one of the few) to do really complicated full sentence rhyme scheme patterns for a whole song. So I guess I’m really into innovation and bringing new ideas to the table. You can see that in the stuff I’ve shared with the SEO community, like Keyword-Level Demographics and my Social Link Building approaches. In general I think I’m pretty good at seeing what is there and what isn’t and then creating it.”
9. What are you plans for 2012 with iAcquire?
“I have a lot of exciting things in the works actually. I’m personally most excited about expanding our offering and building new products. So you might already know about our product LinkDiagnosis. I’m making suggestions to our tech team who will be rebuilding that from scratch.
We recently brought my friend Josh Giardino (who you might remember wrote the “Googlebot is Chrome” article) aboard as Manager of R&D and I’m working on some awesome projects with him one of which is a Broken Link Index. I’m rolling out a ton of content, blog posts, studies, white papers, comic strips, cartoons, videos, the whole 9. I’m even toying with the idea of putting together a small conference or at least a big meetup.
The expansion of our offering is pretty exciting too because as of now we have mastered off page seo, but we’re doing more strategic stuff for clients and growing into a holistic SEO agency like what I described in the New SEO Process. So ultimately, I’ll be helping the link building team get better at what they do and leading the on page SEO and digital brand strategy teams. It’s my goal to build the absolute best team in the game.”
10. Having read some of your great articles recently. How do you do it! Any tips for upcoming bloggers and content writers out there?
“Thanks for saying that; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed them.
Really, I don’t have any tricks. I don’t have any ghostwriters. I don’t even have the time to do as much as I do and I’m definitely not as prolific as someone like John Doherty, Rand Fishkin or Danny Sullivan.
I also only try to write when I have something of value to truly add to the conversation and I try to do it exhaustively. So many people are saying the same thing over and over so find something that you are truly passionate about and you can bring something new to.
That said – the best way to do it is to do it.”
11. What’s your sign off message for the UK?
Why shoot the breeze about it, when you can be about it?
Enough said?
Andy Betts has worked in search marketing from its conception in the UK. In the past 12 years Andy has worked for, and with, many of the world’s largest agencies and brands helping formulate marketing, business, and search strategies for companies such as Apple, HP, HSBC, United Airlines, Lexis Nexis, and Saxo Bank. Andy has also spent considerable time consulting in Europe, APAC, and in the USA working with Google, Performics, Publicis and Dentsu. Andy also consultants for many search and digital technology startups, agencies, and direct advertisers on sales and marketing, products and technology.
The session covered various strategies on how to avoid Panda and Penguin and focused on the future of link building. There were some very different viewpoints and some interesting takeaways.
Ken Dobell, President, Digital, DAC Group
Ken covered the why and the how of Panda and posed the question what is in the head of a panda or a penguin. Most adult search engine users say the relevance and quality of results are improving over time. This is probably because people are getting better at search. 43% of all searches consist of four or more words. 64% of these searches return zero exact matches. This shows the demand of search exceeding the supply of search results.
We as SEOs optimise for broad terms, this is a short sighted strategy and typically the first search undertaken before the search is refined. Relevancy is massively important as search engines try and become more focused on usefulness. Answering a skeletal question is no longer enough. This is why eHow got hit. Penguin was in response to Google telling SEOs to stop trying so hard. The next generation is universal and semantic search.
Google is going far beyond ten blue links and are moving towards a deeper more personal engagement. Combined with social signals this is only going to get more important. We need to keep it real and make sure you create great content which satisfies a need. People need to like you more than they need to notice you. Make sure your landing pages answer questions, are easy to use and are scalable.
Focus on what matters, create fulfilling user experiences and focus on where Google is going.
Simon Penson, founder, Zazzle Media LTD
Simon focused on understanding site penalties. Penguin is a filter to kill webspam but it’s had a far greater impact. It’s really ramped up of late as the rollouts get closer together. The greatest fear we have is the fear of the unknown. The continuum of understanding is a process that will help you deal with that:
1) Data – understanding your own link profile and work out where it’s weakest. Anchor text, relevance and low quality links are all issues.
2) Information – add context to the data and structure it in a way that helps you understand it. Add competitors. You should look for short paragraphs of text and groups of links & content, evaluate if you are there.
3) Knowledge – build up experience; look at your backlink acquisition graph. It should be a smooth graph, peaks and troughs are bad.
4) Wisdom – live with it long term
Key takeaways: understand your link profile using the methods above and rework if necessary.
Stephen Croome, Head of SEO Delivery, SEOGadget
Stephen shared a case study of PrezzyBox and how they got hit by Panda. They completely lost all rankings but recovered.
The work they did:
1) Get a good monitoring system – use AWR, GA, GWMT, Twitter, Email, if you don’t have a group of people on email you should do.
2) Use data to help clients make difficult decisions – getting clients to get rid of large sections of their website is tough. Check all the content that isn’t driving traffic, its low quality traffic and you could get rid of it.
3) Cleaned up the site’s index by dealing with extraneous URLs – there were loads of querystring based urls, they deleted or re-homed orphan pages. They cleaned up their internal linking and global nav.
4) Rewrote the content that drove money but got rid of the dupe content.
5) Throw away categories that had no depth of products – only target good content and throw away bad content
6) They created unique content for every category. Snippets were fine for now but they will need to improve that. They used related searches to build in snippets
7) Used UGC – each product was shared
Vince Blackham, Director of Social Media, 97th Floor (@vinceblackham)
Vince focused about how social is affecting search and how content plays a part in that. Last month 52 updates were made to the algo and authority was affected in 6 of them. Links are carrying less weight and there is more to come. With Google getting better at evaluating bad links content is going to be the best long term exercise. People are still more interested in data visualisation than a year ago. Bad designs won’t get you anywhere. Test various infographics and that helps you build up a case that works best.
Permabait is an interactive that’s based on an API that’s interesting and permanent. A breakdown on Warren Buffets money earning through a Yahoo API was a great success. Instruction based graphics target Pinterest and resulted in great visits but great revenue too. They also generate a lot of links and impact in the social graph. Do it all now and embrace social.
SEOs were piling into the conference room to see Scott Krager of serps.com and Duran Inci of Optimum7, talk about the thing that’s bothering us all most at the moment, apart from the pesky penguins. [Not Provided] is a problem (for SEOs), because Google is hiding the keyword data that Google users are using when searching whilst logged into their Google+/profile account. Once signed in, Google users are automatically logged into a secure browsing function (https://). You may have noticed, in your analytics, that a large percentage of your traffic comes from keywords that you are unable to see. It’s frustrating! How do we know which keywords we need to work more/less on?
According to Scott, we are going to continue to see less and less keyword data. So we need to get used to the idea. Rolled out in March 2011, SEOs across the globe have questioned why Google have implemented this new ‘privacy update’, saying that it could have been designed to make Google more money. Is it possible that Google will, one day, charge money to get access to this data? It’s hard not to be weary at a time when Google is launching their ‘Premium Google Analytic’ packages, which also comes with a premium price tag.
![Scott Krager talking about [Not provided] at London SMX](http://www.stateofsearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/x2_c7778e5.jpg)
As Scott and Duran challenged and questioned Google’s motivation to provide the [Not Provided] results, Pierre Far, one of Google’s leading analysts, made a surprising but welcome appearance. He proceeded to give us what felt like a good telling off for talking dirty about Google. Pierre was very defensive and told us all firmly that Google’s ‘privacy function’ was not just an excuse to cover up some other ‘evil’ plan, but was a genuine attempt to improve the user experience. Surprise surprise, another Googler telling us that everything they do is with the best interest of the user in mind. It was clear that Pierre genuinely believes in the privacy function of Google products, and told us all in his booming voice, that he was very proud to work for the first search engine to take its users’ privacy so seriously. In another defensive pitch, Pierre noted that far more keyword data is available than we realise, and that we should pay greater attention to our webmaster tools. He even tried to downplay the effect of [Not Provided] data, saying that not all industries will be affected by the update. This, however, was quickly, and aggressively dismissed by the majority of SEOs in the room.
Perhaps us SEOs are just becoming a little over sensitive to Google’s updates, perhaps we’re scared that they are going to make it impossible for us to provide our services and earn our bread. As if to echo my own thoughts, a member of the audience asked the question; “It all sounds really great, and I know we need to be willing to change, but are we all screwed?”
Scott Krager, quickly apologised for bringing the tone of the session down, and being ‘depressing’. He explained that we are not screwed, and that NOW is actually a very exciting time to be an SEO. Finally, Google are enforcing their rules and levelling the playing field. Spammy SEO is finally being punished by updates like Panda and Penguin. The rules remain the same as they’ve always been and promote quality content, easy usability, authentic links and generally ‘being nice’. We all know the rules, now is the time to play by them. Admittedly, the [Not Provided] mystery was not really ‘solved’, instead, it seems we are told “It is happening, deal with it”.
In an attempt to lift our spirits, Scott gave us some advice on what we can do before 100% of our keyword data is [Not Provided].
Scott also encouraged us to be transparent with our clients/bosses. We may not be able to show all of the keywords that are providing traffic, but shouldn’t be afraid to show how much traffic is being generated by [Not Provided] keywords. Scarily, Scott suggested that we should assume that ALL keyword referral data will be gone in the next 12 months. I guess it’s a case of “Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail.”
Scott basically confirmed what we have all been trying to ignore. As he put it, Google aren’t all of a sudden going to change their minds and return to their old ways of sharing ALL keyword data. This is the way things are, we have to deal with what we’ve got. Be the opposite of [Not Provided], share everything, be completely transparent. Control what you can. Measure what you can. What more can we do?
Danny started by giving the background on Google+ and how we need to engage with it to expand and future proof our SEO strategies.
Bas started by going through the numbers. Google + is still very small when compared to Facebook from an engagement and a visitor perspective. This leads to apathy towards Google+ but there is more to it than that. Eric Schmidt’s recent quote about everything moving towards the Google + platform in the future shows how important it is.
People are using Google+ because they have to. The mind set is key. The most basic human needs is the need to connect with others. It’s a nice sentiment but how is it important? Google has started analysing how people work and are translating that to the search engine. People trust authorities, People want what others have which is largely fuelled by jealousy. We are also open to peer pressure. We also like to spread the word about products and other people.
Google + is bringing in these elements into the search environment. Stop thinking they will kick out Facebook, it’s to get a grip on who we are. It’s all about data. We are getting personalised results in the US already and that’s coming to Europe soon. This is all to figure out who you are, who your friends are, what you do and to which entities you are connected. Go to http://google.com/s2/search/social#gd and you can see who Google thinks you are connected to. These connections power Google social search and they are constantly trying to get more of the offline world online.
They are showing authoritative people within each sector. Rel Author is also powering this. Personalised search is also sharing other things like who is at which event. The images increase the amount of click through for those results. You can also thank people that share your content. Google results are also showing conversations in Google+ and you can participate in that conversation in the search results.
People are more interested in the stuff their social circle share than your stuff. Your target audience are the people that share your content as much as the people that are buying your product. Find your brand advocates. Make sure that you make your content shareable. Work on your social circle and create content that your market wants.
Kevin wanted to share how much juice you get from Google+, in theory annotations can increase your CTR by 5- 10% according to Google.
1) Miele: 19% CTR without +1s and 0% with the +1s.
2) Soft32 has 456 people that like their brand page – 9% CTR without +1s and 5% CTR with +1s
Overall in both CTR cases G+ had a negative impact but it actually makes sense because the +1 listings are less relevant than the informational results. The second reason is that the brand CTR is always going to be big compared to the deeper pages. Kevin argues that the CTR is really not the major win. The win is that you are getting traffic you would not otherwise get.
He tested clients with G+ vs. clients without.
They saw a 19.5% decrease in organic traffic for clients that aren’t using Google+. The converse was true with clients seeing a 43% increase in clients that did use Google+.
Asos is doing a lot with Google+ which has had a major search impact for Asos.com search impact. They are seeing a 100% improvement on organic traffic.
This doesn’t mean that Google+ has a direct correlation to organic rankings. Google+ doesn’t really matter at the moment in the algo but it is very likely to be there in the future. Google + is being pushed like crazy with 353 million pages indexed.
With Google penguin making things harder links are becoming more outdated as an authority element. This paves the way for social signals to form a bigger part of the algorithm.
1) Focus your SEO strategy on great content, don’t chase the algorithm, build great content
2) Build a great content team. Community managers, bloggers, content strategists, infographic designers, guest authors and video producers are all key parts of SEO teams in the future. Bring in people that can make your content stand out more.
3) Use rel=author to get more value
4) Create a G+ brand page and link to your site this syncs up your home page + 1s with your brand + 1s. Brand page +1s have been shown to influence search more than home page + 1s
5) Go in once a day and share your post and comment on your friend’s posts
1) View your social connections to a scary level (link is above in Bas’ presentation)
2) Find influencers on findpeopleonplus.com
3) Analyse your reach on Google+ Ripples and evaluate people that share people like you
4) Social sources analytics stream in GA
So in summary G+ has a negative CTR but that doesn’t matter because they are ranking better because of it. Ensure that content marketing is a central part of your SEO strategy.
Local search can be one of the most effective ways to target your marketplace, but it is surprising how many business get it ‘wrong’. This session showed us what to consider as a local business or as a national business targeting locally. (more…)
Welcome to SMX Day 2! This was a session that I was looking forward to as the year of Mobile is finally here. It was a great panel with some great takeaways from a stats and best practice perspective.
Andy Atkins-Krueger, Group CEO, WebCertain (@andyatkinskruge)
Andy started the session by saying how important the session was as it’s an area that is big. Mobile broadband is bigger than desktop in some countries. The mobile use segment is also growing rapidly. 33% of mobile is at home particularly in front of the TV. The trends show that mobile is catching PC. Tablet overlap is only 6.6% in the EU. 66% of all mobile traffic is on an Apple device hence Google rolling out the g+ app on Apple first. There is also 87% growth in mobile retail year on year. (more…)
There are many analytics packages that are used and each come with various features. One of the most used analytics packages by far is Google Analytics. In this session, four speakers who are experts in this field are going to show us tools and features that you may or not be aware of that will help you to improve the performance of your website and increase your ROI.
This is a session I am really looking forward to as Martijn Beijk, one of the State of Search bloggers is taking to the stage along with Anna Lewis, who is a fellow member of the Koozai team!
Running a paid search campaign isn’t just about getting your campaign optimised and driving traffic to your site, more importantly the landing pages need to convert otherwise you will not be getting the ROI you are looking for.
In this session at SMX London 2012, four great speakers take to the stage to share their tips on how to create effective landing pages that people just can’t say no to.
Kicking off SMX London was a relaxed, and relatively informal, chat with Google’s senior VP, Amit Singhal (we interviewed Amit Singhal for SMX recently). The more talks I see from Google staff, the more I realise that the company seems to be made up of child like geniuses. Their enthusiasm to create something special is matched only by their intelligence and ability. I walked in to Amit’s Google chat as he was exclaiming; “At Google, we understand”. He was explaining that Google understands that search engines need to make the jump, from purely understanding ‘words’, to understanding ‘things’. Search engines, according to Amit, need to be able to understand that ‘Mount Everest’ and ‘K2’ are not just words, but are in fact mountains. Until Google understands the ‘real world’, it will never be able to properly return results for questions like ‘What are the ten tallest mountains in the world’. He also expressed that Google are getting closer to that goal and are slowly beginning to understand user’s ‘intent’.
“Computers don’t understand ‘words’, they understand ‘strings’.”
Amit’s enthusiasm overflowed as he talked about how he feels that his team at Google at closer than ever to building the ‘Star Trek’ machine that he dreamt of as a child. You can see that in Amit’s eyes, it’s not just about building a search engine, but also about building a complete super computer, or ‘Star Trek Computer’ as he puts it.
Amit did a great job of avoiding controversial questions, and pretty much side stepped the following question from an audience member; “Is Google Search Plus Your World doing too much to promote Google property?” We’ve all asked the question and considered the consequences, so it was interesting to get a response directly from Google. Amit basically replied by discussing how the problem with Plus Your World, was that it was incomplete. He expressed that it was merely the baby steps towards what they are aiming at. Basically, Amit tells us, because so much of what we ‘share’ is on a private basis, such as email, Facebook messages or Twitter DM, it is very difficult to measure or understand what is personal to different people.
What I really noticed, when Amit talked about Search Plus Your World, was that he talked in the past tense, as if it’s already old news to him. Apart from sidestepping past the issue, Amit told us that the emphasis on personalisation has proved very successful with user testing, and ultimately that is all they care about. Whichever way you look at it, SPYW didn’t seem like a pertinent issue to Amit, and by the sounds of it, he has bigger fish to fry. Similarly, when somebody asked him if he could explain more about the ‘Venice Update’, he actually needed to be reminded ‘which’ update it was.
As with all Googlers, Amit fell easily into the role of protector. According to Amit, everything Google do is in order to provide a great user experience. Everything is trialled through A/B testing and is measured on a regular basis. Google also have a huge ‘sand pit’ where they can run in-house tests, where they also employ a a team of non-biased ‘real life users’ that are mined for information.
“At the end of the day, users will return to the engine with the most relevant searches” – Amit Singhal
In an attempt, I believe, to mix things up a little and get away from the ‘Be nice’ Google talk, Danny Sullivan asked Amit to “Tell us about the Penguin!”
Of course, the Penguin update is one of the main topics we all want to hear about, but I feel this was another topic that Amit was keen to sidestep. Danny provoked the conversation with a question that hit the spot; “Have we gone as far as we can with links?” Is it still possible to extract information about a site from its link profile?
“It’s a variation of ‘signals’ that reinforce each other, which strengthens a websitess ranking.” – Amit Singhal
What Amit is saying is that a strong link profile is no longer sufficient for high ranking pages. Instead, we must work across the board and develop as many ‘signals’ as possible. No doubt this includes Google+ at the top of the list! In an attempt to justify the Penguin update, Amit tells us that “Since the Penguin update, relevancy is up, and that’s all that counts.”
For some Larry Page or Sergey Brin might be the big mind when it comes to Google. Others believe its Matt Cutts who holds all the knowledge. But ask any Googler who has the most influence on what actually happens with the search engine Google and most probably 99% of them will answer: Amit Singhal.
Amit Singhal is the Senior VP at Google, a “Google Fellow”, and the head of Google’s core ranking team. There are not many issues with Google Search which do not go past him. Amit Singhal and his team are responsible for the Google search algorithms. The video from the Search Quality Meeting which we showed before and is also placed at the end of this post shows just that: it is Singhal who makes the decisions and it is Singhal who knows the most. Anyone who looks at leaderships will also notice that the way Singhal leads the meeting is like a natural leader.
In a few weeks time Singhal will make a rare appearance on the stage of a major search conference. And even rarer: that appearance will not be in the US, but in Europe: at SMX London 2012. We talked to Danny Sullivan about that show earlier and now we have the exclusive chance to talk to Amit Singhal who was kind enough to answer some of our burning questions. We tried to ask him questions on different topics: Search Plus Your World, the Panda Update, Google and Europe and some of the privacy issues Google is running into. Enjoy! (more…)
In about a month SMX London 2012 will open its doors in the Chelsea Stadium in London. At the event search marketers in Europe will gather to obtain knowledge and network. SMX London has now announced the full agenda of the show and the line up of speakers.
We already knew that Amit Singhal would be keynoting SMX London and that Danny Sullivan would return to the London event after being a few years away. Now we can also confirm that more Googlers and more “UK SEO Celebrities” will be presenting at the conference.
Speakers at the conference are for example Christine Churchill, Stephen Pavlovich, Chris Sherman, Ed Schofield, Anders Hjorth, Guy Levine, Andy Atkins-Krueger, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Rob Kerry, Martijn Beijk, Richard Baxter, Navneet Virk, Simon Heseltine, Kevin Gibbons, Bas van den Beld, Maile Ohye and Ken Dobell. (more…)
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