I am so dragging ass today... it's not even close to being funny. I guess my weekend as well as the events from yesterday's (day 1) SMX Conference is finally starting to catch up with me. In any event, my day yesterday kicked off with a quick visit to the registration booth (I would have registered on Sunday as most people did, but for some reason when trying to I found that my badge was not printed - no biggie), followed by a continental-style breakfast on the conference floor.

My first session of the day was "You&A (Q&A) with Matt Cutts" in which the audience fired many algorithmic search-related questions spanning multiple areas at Matt, and he would address each specifically. I was actually impressed by this session. Going in, I thought Matt would be pleading the 5th on almost half of everything that was asked, but he didn't. He did a tremendous job of addressing near every question.

A couple of take-away from this session include:

Matt would not confirm nor deny the use of click-throughs (from the SERPS) as being apart of the metrics used in their ranking formula. I, for the longest time, have always thought that Google not only takes in consideration the user's click-through when deciding relevance, but also whether or not that user returns to the SERPS immediately following that click-through... essentially meaning that the user did not deem the website as being helpful and has moved on to find a better one.

Another interesting piece of info that was shared (but again was neither confirmed nor denied by Matt) is that Google's SPAM technology checks to see what other websites a specific webmaster owns (and ultimately whether or not those sites have been flagged for SPAM) when reviewing over a site. The example used at the session was if a site was questionable and a quick check-up showed that the same owner owned 200 flagged websites that probably this 201st website should be flagged as well. Which in my mind makes a lot of sense.

My second session of the day was the "Duplicate Content Summit". This session was paneled by representatives from each of the major search engines... Ask, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and of course Google. Personally speaking... I thought that this session could have been a little more advanced than it was, but overall it wasn't a bad session.

One take-away was the mention of using a "Robots No Content" tag to mark low value content such as copyright information and other repeated (non-value) pieces of content. This tag is currently supported only by Yahoo! and is a great way to help the search engine determine what your primary content is for each page.

Another blurb worth sharing is that Ask, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google all support the sitemap attribute in the robots.txt file. I originally thought it was just Google that supported this feature, but that isn't the case. Simply list the URL of your Google Sitemap in the robot.txt file (using proper protocol of course) and all engines will crawl and take note of it.

My next two sessions were those in the Advertising track (paid search) and included the "Paid Search & Tricky Issues" and "Inside the Auction Black Box" session. Honestly, I didn't get too much out of either session with the exception of a re-rundown on many of the same old theories as to what Google's (and other search engines respectively) black box algorithm includes. Actually, at one time the topic was side-tracked a little when the panel and audience began discussing their own conspiracy theories as to the amount of data Google collects from multiple locations on a daily basis. That was a pretty interesting and humorous conversation.

The exhibit hall is very small compared to that of several of the past SES exhibits I've attended. I guess that's about right though, a small conference equals a small exhibit sesstion. I took a quick tour through it, and will no doubt make a second trip later on today.

Lunch was absolutely fabulous. I was so expecting the traditional boxed sandwich lunch that SES provides, and was very much happy to see a hot-plate buffet.

The last part of the day featured a Keynote conversation between Danny and Satya Nadella, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's newly-created Search & Advertising Platform Group. I thought this went over really well. In the past Microsoft has been pretty much non-existant at search conferences, and so I, for one, am glad to see that they made an effort to be well represented at this conference (and why shouldn't they... Seattle is their backyard). The keynote conversation addressed many of the Microsoft's past and more importantly future goals as a major player in the search industry.

Here is a video I took of one of the questions addressed during the keynote:

The night ended with a Yahoo Search Marketing Networking Session and an SMX After Dark: Google Dance NW where I ran into such celebs and Jim Boykin and Chris Hooley. It was great meeting you guys. All in all, both parties were fairly decent... however they were nowhere near their SES San Jose counter parts. They got the job done though and that's all that matters.