Last night I attended the SEMNE event held in Providence, RI. Nick Gerner of SEOmoz was the presenter of “Inside the Black Box: How Search Engines Rank Web Pages“.
Nick is a Search Engineer and co-developer of SEOmoz’s new Linkscape product. (He mentioned the other primary co-developer several times, and it is my bad that I didn’t record his name. Maybe Nick can remind me… And he did – see comments below – Ben Hendrickson and the whole SEOmoz development team!)
Nick was prepared, knew his material, and his enthusiasm was contagious. He shared relevant information, and was at ease answering, and indeed, was excited to answer questions ranging from right-on-target to related-through-several-layers of “what ifs”.
Nick talked about the delicate balance of providing valuable user experiences and attracting search engines at the same time. Topics included Text Classification, Page Rank, Rank Time Techniques, Semantic Links, Sentiment Indexing, Document Structure, Link Analysis and Link Spams, Linkscape and mozRank, and more…
I was impressed with his presentation skills and his knowledge. His slides were a great complement to his message, and made understanding the concepts easy… and thought-provoking.
My goal at any event is to walk away with a nugget or two. Goal accomplished – AND – I have 4 pages of notes to review and think about. …About what the search engines are looking for, how they categorize, the super (have you heard it before?) importance of inbound links, and the importance and relevancy of products like Linkscape.
So Kudos to SEMNE for inviting Nick and Kudos to Nick for a great presentation and re-energizing my thoughts around my approach to SEO.