The SMX West 2009 Search Engine Expo (Conference) was held Feb 10-12 at the Santa Clara Convention Center
SMX West turned out to be an outstanding conference. There was a strong presence from the big search engines including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ASK, as well as many SEO optimization industry experts and gurus.
If you want a lot of bang for your buck for your educational dollars, SMX West is a solid choice of conference to attend. They are held at different locations around the country every few months.
I had two productive visits with the Google staffers and experts in their booth on the show floor; and probably two dozen SEO / online marketing firms. Google SEO experts showed Financial Advisor and Tech Stock Wonk Lloyd Nirenberg of Rocket Capital, and one of my interested friends, how to turn his content-rich, graphically appealing, yet lightly trafficked blog into a “hot blog” in a matter of a couple of months.
Thurday I attended three of the best panel sessions of the show, on SEO.
After lunch, leading Search Engine experts analyzed various sites for SEO efficacy, including my own blog. It resulted in a surprising SEO breakthrough. It turns out that several of our sites have fallen victim to PHP and SQL code injection attacks; sending traffic elsewhere, and reducing our site/page rankings.
In a related development, at Noon Thursday Google announced an unusual partnership with Microsoft and Yahoo, that intends to “clean up the web”. No; not the adult sites 
, but the multiple, messy URL’s that burden the industry. A new “tag” will be created that allows duplicate pages to be consolidated under one “clean” search-engine-friendly URL.
