PubCon Recap Day 3 - Spam Hunt

This being my first PubCon, I did not know what to expect from the much talked about dream panel of Matt Cutts (Google), Tim Mayer (Yahoo), Danny Sulllivan (SearchEngineWatch.com), Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla) and Todd Friesen (Range Online). They participated in a session called "Interactive Site Reviews and SERPS Quality Control". I discovered this was basically code for "spam hunt"...

Folks from the audience would submit business cards with their websites on them. The panel would then randomly select sites to review and provide feedback. Matt Cutts was most entertaining as he ran his toolkit of secret Google programs to uncover the dirt on any and all sites that got in his path. Site owners were given the microphone to introduce their site and what they are looking for help on. The panel in turn would offer suggestions and then, in most cases, expose hidden blackhat tactics on almost all the sites... It was all done in good fun and I found it by far the most enjoyable session.

Some learnings I took away from it:

1. Yahoo Penalty - If you have a penalty assigned to your site, Yahoo may not show the "cache" link of your pages, and the titles may appear in lower case. Both are a sign that you may want to consider evaluating your site for any problems.

2. Dashes in a URL are better than underscore. Not sure how important this is, but Matt Cutts did make this comment as a recommendation during one of the site reviews.

3. Yahoo Deep Crawl - Having an authoritive inbound link will encourage Yahoo to deep crawl your content.

4. Google Supplemental Results - One audience member asked about their pages showing up randomly in the results. Sometimes there, sometimes not. Matt Cutts theorized that they were most like on the fringe and jumping back and forth between supplemental and regular results. He mentioned the solve the problem, just get your pagerank up (more quality inbound links) and that should push you out of the supplemental.

Gotta run and catch my flight!