SMX Advanced 2009 turned out to be a great show, and as always, it held some excitement. The two most exciting occurrences at the show were Microsoft’s new search brand Bing and the debate that broke out over Google’s PageRank Sculpting and nofollow practices. WebProNews spoke with Jeremiah Andrick to get his perspective on both issues.

As a former employee of Microsoft, Jeremiah said the search team is constantly working to improve the “depth and abilities to recognize new content” and believes they are making the “right” changes with Bing. Although time holds the only answer to whether people will truly accept Bing, people within the search industry are encouraged by Microsoft’s effort. So many businesses depend on Google to make money, and therefore the industry would like to see diversity brought to the table.

The second most popular topic at SMX Advanced was the issue regarding PR Sculpting and nofollow with Google. We first told you about the debate in our interview with Stephan Spencer. In a nutshell, it appears that the risky practice of PR sculpting is not as valuable as it once could be and the way Google views nofollow is also evolving. Matt Cutts did try to clarify Google’s position in a blog post here.

According to Jeremiah, he doesn’t see this impacting SEO in the short term. He also stresses the importance of testing and looking at analytics. How do you feel about this situation? Do you believe this will heavily impact your SEO efforts?

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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