Following the rather disappointing session on duplicate content, the later sessions were a (slight) improvement.

The session on social media saw Rand from SEOmoz listing the most influential social media sites for ranking & traffic is, which had YouTube at #1. It also included Yelp which I had never heard of before, and the nugget of information that the comments in Flickr don’t have a nofollow, and therefore pass ‘link love’. He also said that Twitter was useless which made me happy as I agree.

Neil Patel of ProNet explained the rules of social media, most of which are pretty obvious and could be summarised as don’t try to spam these communities. As with all aspects of online business, there may be a short-term gain in illicit activities, but they soon get found out - especially when the audience control the site (as with digg & all the rest).

The session after the (surprisingly good) lunch was on the move towards personalised search and included speakers from Google & Yahoo! Matt (Google) & Tim (Yahoo!) made some amusingly bitchy comments about the other’s businesses, but again, there was little real insight.

The session on personalisation could be summed up as follows; all the search engines have large amounts of data, Google are starting to use this, a lot of people in the industry are nervous about the issues with privacy, and Yahoo! are playing the ‘holier than thou’ card for all its worth. Oh, and Yahoo! are probably going to phase out their My Web bookmarking service and use del.icio.us instead. And Google ought to buy some more social bookmarking tools as these have loads of great data.

The evening saw a group of us being bought dinner by two very nice guys from epiar & then the Google Dance, which contrary to what I had been lead to believe, had a free bar for a couple of hours. Which was nice, so thank you Google and I’m sorry I doubted you. And it also saw the aforementioned Rand Fishkin putting on a t-shirt promoting the new website SEO Chicks. And dancing really badly (video of which will follow later).

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