The final session of PubCon last week was the Search Engine Smackdown, with representatives of each engine giving a “State of the Engine” address, and then answering questions as a group. On the panel were Matt Cutts of Google, Sean Suchter of Yahoo, and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search. It was moderated by Brett Tabke.
Rather than a smackdown, it came across more like a pillow fight. Matt’s 2009 trends were interesting, however:
- Blackhat moves toward the outright illegal:
- DNS subdomain hijacking
- Cross site scripting
- Malware
- Google will keep communicating.
- Google will keep providing tools.
We’ll see. Cutts and Google certainly have a vested interest in portraying black hat SEO in the worst possible light. While neither my firm nor I engage in any black hat, I’m not completely comfortable with their being painted with such a broad brush.
During the Q&A section, the topic of RipOffReport came up. Matt explained that he’s looked at the site, and doesn’t believe their engaged in any SEO spamming. Until/unless they receive a court order telling them to remove it from Google, they will not do so.
Here are some links to additional coverage of this session:
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