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?

Now, nearly four months after the announcement, there seems to be a problem. During a session at SMX Advanced, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts revealed that he had found some examples of the Canonical Tag not being obeyed by Google. He raises the issue that the Canonical Tag is merely a “hint” to Google and cannot be fully relied on.

As a result, Stephan recommends using 301 redirects since they are direct and will be obeyed. Stephan believes that Google misunderstood the explanation of his position since a debate broke out about nofollow and PR sculpting during the session and involved Matt Cutts and Nathan Buggia. Lisa Barone, who liveblogged the debate, recalls that Matt indicated that nofollow was not as effective as it once was. Nathan also stated Bing’s position that PR sculpting using nofollow was not a very valuable tactic for users to implement.

At this point, there has been no clarification of the issue. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Stephan? How do you think this will get resolved?