I figured I check this out again, since some new people are on the panel. He introduced everyone, Mike Grehan, Rand Fishkin SEOMoz, Mikkel Svendsen, Alan K'necht and Greg Jarboe.
Mike Grehan was up first; and he started up wit his background where he was raised in a village and trained in the fine art of mystical SEO. Wish I taped that 1 minute introduction. Rand Fishkin discussed how his tools were banned but they had a work around. Mikkel introd himself as the dynamic and dark side of SEO. Alan K'necht from Toronto, an SEO company from Canada. Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR, he said all SEO PR's are all dark, he was joking but he said he uses all "white hat techniques" and borrowed Bruce Clay's code.
Q: What is the best way to handle subscription content, paid content? A: Show a sample of the content, an abstract. Mikkel adds there are other solutions but they get more risky and complex (i.e. allowing spiders only, only allowing bots in for 2 weeks). People added that if the content is quality enough, like NY Times then it is accepted to ask people to register, it can be annoying but some sites can get away with it.
Q: GoPros.ca (or gopro.ca) has hundreds of domain names, it is a directory site, with keyword based URLs, and then pages are redirected back to the main URL. It ranks very well. A: Mikkel said he has seen cases like this and it can be banned, and if it is banned, it will be very hard to get back. You should probably put all the content on the single domain name, 301 the rest to the landing page, and it should continue to rank well in time. It will help with link building to link to one domain name, instead of many. Mike adds that buy linking between these hundreds of domain names, its much like a link network, and gopros.ca is much like that. Mikkel then got upset that someone can ruin these great generic domain names, "ruin" in get them banned forever.
Q: RSS feeds and how can I use it to help? A: Greg answers that its big now and will be huge soon. Greg says its easy to add RSS feeds. But what people do not think about is that they take their content and syndicate it. He said if you don't think about optimizing that content you are syndicating, then your making a mistake. Mikkel adds an other reason to use RSS is that (1) there is a cool factor with RSS, (2) there are quality directories of RSS feeds and those are nice links back to your site, (3) from a distribution standpoint, it is great. Rand explains more about RSS. Mike adds that you can easily build a resource section and use other people's content, the abstract in almost real time, which links back to the source.
Q: What do I do if I have a USA, Canadian, French, etc. version of my Web site? How do I handle it? A: Many recommended doing IP redirection based on user location. Many sites ask you to select your location or enter a zip code and this is bad.
Q: I did a search on "Montreal Web Design" or something like that, and the #1 ranking was by a site that "harvested" a .edu site and pointed links to its site. Should I do this? A: Everyone said no. Google and other engines will pick up on it. Rand threw me a plug about my quick chat with Matt Cutts from Google about Google not becoming a register to register domain names. Short term it will work, but long term - no one would do it.
They then went off on a tangent about PageRank being a hoax, in other words.
Q: Submitting your site to an Add URL page. A: Mikkel gave this awesome analogy. He used to work in a records company and people used to send in demo tapes, which the company kept in a hug box. Then at the company annual party, they used to randomly pick demo tapes to play at the party and laugh at them. That is what the search engines do with your submitted pages. :)
Q: My old content is being ranked above my old content, what do I do? A: Point more links to the new content, and also link from old content to the new content, use RSS to help, press releases, and so on.
