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A4Uexpo was a blast!

E05F72B5-BF33-4BC7-ABBF-820092F0BD17.jpgOw boy, it was so much fun. Meeting great people, seeing amazing presentations and hearing stories from the old days, back alleys of the internet and really smart people doing great stuff with their websites. Matthew at existem did a great job.

First night there was a pre-party where you could pick up your passes already. Spotting Marcus, Dave and his lovely wife becky got us into some SEO talk, but mostly good clean fun. My old colleague Joost joined us pretty fast (us being my friend Evert from veroworx and me). Auke from Affilinet was there are also, and we’ve been drinking a beer or two till the bar closed down, a great start of this conference.

Next day was starting out for me a 8 o’clock. My girlfriend had her birthday so I had to call her. Next up was some time to plough through my presentation, since I’ve started to get a little nervous. Didn’t matter, Joost his presentation about WordPress started at 11 and I wanted to see that, since he’s a good friend with great presentations. It rocked, and i’ve heard a lot of great feedback about that presentation. Nothing new for me, but the crowd loved it. And a big crowd it was!

Then there was the extreme SEO session, with a great line-up. Joost, Marcus, Dave and Rob were moderated by Ciaran which did a great job! Some other sessions could have used his moderation as well. It was an good session. Focused a lot on negative SEO and buying quality links and ‘silver bullets’ (links that kill a site immediately). Had a lot of fun, and the quality was high. Nothing I could ever use for our customers, but knowing what’s possible is never a bad thing.

After that my presentation was up. Getting in the room looked good. 5 minutes before the start the room was packed already and people had to stay out, so the people of a4uexpo decided that we should switch rooms again so more people could see it. I guess there were between 100 and 140 people were in there. That would double the fun. Went through my presentation about Internal link building. I think I’ve made my point that it all was about contextual relevant links to you money pages and consistency. Andrew Girdwood did his talk about external link building and being controversial as he is, he advised that if your merchants were buying links, you’d report them and start ranking for the brandname as being a publisher. I think people liked his presentation as well.

Then we had to rush to catch the bus to the silver sturgeon which would sails us across the Thames, from buckingham palace till the millennium dome. That was pretty fun as well, although the food dividing was a bit fucked up. Some people literally were diving like vultures on the food since there wasn’t enough of it at the same time and people were starving. Didn’t matter that much since drinks were good and there was great red wine. There are some great pictures on the flickr page.

Hmm, this is actually enough for day 1 and the pre-party. I’ll write up a review on day 2 on our company blog since this will be live in a couple of days from now with a great revamp.

You can find other reviews at:

Update:

A4Uexpo presentation online now!

Well, it’s done. I gave my presentation about Internal Link Building and it went pretty well. Got great feedback and people were telling me they liked the talk.

If you want to see my slides they are on slideshare now:
http://www.slideshare.net/chapter42/a4uexpo-internal-linking-structure-presentation/

I’m still having a blast in several sessions and I’ll be back in the Netherlands tomorrow. Let me know what you think!

Cheers!

Hey Google, about that canonical thing…

While searching for lego stuff for my son I started out with a query about [lego]. Either this is a canonical issue, or good online reputation management. I do not doubt about the greatness of Lego but is this really what you think is useful for your users? Maybe it’s a better idea to use all these subdomains as sitelinks and provide some choices for your customers, so that they really are able to compare and buy some Lego.

Google’s shortcuts for competition: friend connect

Google just did it again. They managed to bring out an innovative shortcut to prevent a threat. This time the threat of social search, at least they try a bit.  Let’s start this post of with a quote: The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing people he never existed… (feel free to comment the movie).

Vertical Search
The first time Google created a smart shortcut, was by working on Universal Search. This was a good way of coping with the first threat of vertical search. By providing the best mixed search results on the normal result page they kept people on their platform instead of seeking other platforms. Think of all travel comparison engines, the local stuff.  By implementing it on the usual SERP’s they aren’t losing that much traffic because people stay happy.

Social Search
For quite some time a lot of people have been talking about ‘social search’. This should be the next search style, think of it like search 3.0 where your close group of friends are your best providers for information. Think of a comparison and recommendation engines with only people you know and trust.

Now Google pulled another great trick. They launched a kind of widget. This widget could have the power of MyBlogLog, Facebook, Myspace and every recommendation/comparison engine combined. Great thinking Google!

Now what’s going on? Google Friend Connect let’s people connect on their websites with a widget. Now with this widget you could give reviews about that page, send it to other, related, pages, actually all the cool stuff you could need building a social search platform. This way users don’t need to go to the other platform but can directly ask their friends for help. This way Google gets the world information, uses your friends to get the most trustful recommendation, because, who would lie to his friends?

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