Well where the hell do I start? I guess with the thank you bits….

Thanks to Danny Sullivan for inviting me to speak on the “Chase the Algorithm” and the “Organic Search” panels (btw I didn’t even swear!). For those people who have never met Danny before, he’s one of the most honest and funniest members of the SEO community. I have long admired his works and writings and it was great to get the chance to speak in San Jose.

A really really big thank you Matt Cutts, my good friend from Google. He gave Me, ChrisR and Jenstar a PLEX tour! While the rest of the SEO community were partying at the GoogleDance we where being shown around the PLEX. At 1.30am ish our little party was gate crashed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin! (DaveN shakes in pants!) Sergey actually just sat down with us and chatted for a good hour about everything from watches to Google.
I don’t want to say what we talked about in any great depth after all this was just a few guys in the search industry chatting, but what I will say is the guys are so down to earth….all the good things you read about Larry and Sergey are TRUE. I never thought that in my wildest dreams that I would meet the search industry’s most powerful men. One thing I have taken back with me to sunny England is that it’s how you treat your staff that is the key to success. Everyone I met in the PLEX love Google, this is not brainwashed into them, they genuinely love the place and why not….the staff perks there are unbelievable! Anyway enough Google love for now.

And finally thanks to Tim Mayer, my good friend from Yahoo. I got to go to the Yahoo Campus with 18 or so other SEO’s to discuss the new 19.2 Billion page index… ( wow!)
Yahoo looks to have a few issues with websites landing pages will write more on this later….We got a Yahoo tour and helped with recent index size increase and relocations of website’s internal pages (incorrectly located, but they are working on it at the moment), and then on to the all American theme park which was a great way to end another great day.
Tim also announced that Yahoo will be shortly launching siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com (wow again) this will give webmasters a much more detailed reporting system for backlinks and pages included.

Google are still ahead of the game IMO but Yahoo is catching up. For people that don’t remember Tim’s days at the other search engines he was worked for…. this is the 3rd time he has increased an index to be larger than Google’s, so I don’t expect Google will be sitting on the laurels for very long. I’m waiting like the rest of the industry to see what will happen over the next few months… the search wars are ON and Yahoo just won a few field battles.

New friends :-

Barry from Seoroundtable. I have seen the guy around a few times but he’s a Blogger so I kept away, just in case he was like Jeremy Zawodny. He’s Not … in fact Barry is a real nice guy!! He even escaped Google security with me, Shak and Jenstar, to get in to the GoogleDance hehehe… it wasn’t our fault we had a crazy taxi driver lol..

Rand Fishkin aka Randfish from SEOmoz.org. It’s the first time I’ve met Rand and I’ve got to say he’s a really cool guy.

And lastly, I also met Dick Masterson from MenAreBetterThanWomen.com…. what can I say… a real man’s man!