I attended the SEO sessions at SMX London yesterday, there was a lot of interesting data shared by the agencies that attended, thanks in particular to Andrew Girdwood at BigMouth Media, Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility and Rob Kerry at Ayima for their thoughts and to Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz who was clear and concise as always. There was confirmation of a few Google updates, some interesting case studies to show the effects as well. You couldn’t ask for a lot more really!

Key things that are worth highlighting are:

• Google prefers cross-domain canonical tags, rather than 301s so if you’re planning on buying a new URL, consider how much effort you will need to put in to make sure all of your existing link authority is passed to the new domain. There are a number of different considerations here.
• Google does try to pass more value through links that are actually likely to be clicked on. There is no fast rule for how they work this out although not using footer links and preferring links in content are two pieces of advice we follow. One other way of trying to second-guess this is if you have analytics on your site, what links does the overlay tool say are being clicked on?
• If you want to appear for a wide range of products, your domain authority and contextual inbound links to category pages won’t work now. Each category page will need its own ratio of brand:contextual inbound links or it will likely suffer by comparison to niche sites focused on one product alone.

To find out more about the themes from SMX, check out the tweets and links on http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23smx

 Gareth Owen, Head of Natural Search