I'm sitting here on the waterfront in Seattle. SMX Advanced '09 is over. One of the best search marketing focused events I've ever attended. But the "news" from the event is mostly about some stuff Matt Cutts said during "Q&A" at the 'canonical tag' session.

I was present, to moderate the audience Q&A. There really wasn't much of that, because the panelists pretty much did all the talking, or arguing, howerer you want to put it. It was interesting, to be sure.

Matt appears to have come in to bail out Maile Ohye, who had said some stuff that didn't really match up with the Google party line, like saying that rel=nofollow should only be used to mean that you don't vouch for the link. After coming and saying that he supported everything she said (which I don't think he could have even heard), Matt responded to a question about pagination links, didn't actually know what kind of pagination links they were talking about, and said basically that nofollow might not work like people expect for sculpting PageRank. And, some other stuff which many folks have attempted to reconstruct.

First of all, the idea that 'sculpting' - especially the kind of radical sculpting that was being discussed - is not going to work like people expect, isn't really news. Second, Matt didn't really say anything especially clear, either in this panel or the "You&A."

Hopefully someone from Google will add some true clarity to this soon, but for now, relax and don't buy all the hype.

1. If Google really has radically changed the way nofollow and PageRank are handled, they didn't do it overnight - that's major development work. Months.
2. As recently as April 23, Matt had a platform to actually 'announce' something like this but didn't. Didn't say, 'but don't bother because we have a major change in the works.' He said, as he's often said, as I have too, as many others have, that spending a bunch of time trying to "sculpt" PageRank should be way way way down the to-do list.
3. Until someone says something definitive, what you are hearing is people who speculated being interpreted by others, and… you know what? That's not news. That's the blogosphere, and Twit-o-sphere, doing what they do.

A lot of questions were raised by that panel - like whether robots.txt even works, if you want to believe everything that was said, and put the wrong context around it. But it's a beautiful sunny day.

We'll talk more later. I'm going to go say goodbye to the seals in the marina.

Update from Matt - doesn't add much clarity: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Well, enough clarity in the comments there, for me to say that Leslie Rohde nailed it.

When I offered my first online link building course in 2005, I was expecting it to be pretty popular, but it turns out that I *badly* underestimated the demand.

In fact, it was a runaway success.

Almost as soon one 8-week course finished, another group would come in and sell out the next session. It took 7 months for things to calm down.

Since then, thousands of people have seen the "best of" videos - but nobody has been able to get the entire course.

I get asked about it all the time - "Dan, when are you going to do another link building class?"

Well, after months of preparation, I am ready to do another one - but I want to make sure that I'm not leaving anything out.

One of the students back in 2006 said I'd "put together all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle" for them, and I wouldn't want to do any less this time around.

Please help me out if you can spare a few minutes. In return, I'll make it worth your while. (Hint!)

All you have to do is post your comments below - on the biggest questions, problems, and challenges you have with link building.

It's been a while since I've spoken at a search marketing conference. Like, a couple years I think. But I am coming out of the "shell" at SMX Advanced to talk about advanced pay-per-click strategies for the "Amazing PPC Tactics" session.

As is always the case with conference sessions - I have to cram a whole bunch of content into a very short speaking slot, because there will be 3 or 4 other people there dishing out killer PPC tactics as fast as they can.

For a StomperNet Live event, where I usually get to deliver 75-90 minutes to several hundred people, it's easy to prepare a presentation. I don't know if it was Mark Twain or not - somebody put it better than I can once upon a time - but the shortest presentations require the greatest preparation.

Too bad that doesn't apply to Twitter posts. Anyway, I could use a little help from my readers in narrowing down (or broadening if necessary) the scope of this presentation.

I'd love to hear your suggestions on topics, or knotty PPC problems that could really use an amazing tactical solution, in the comments below.