The goal of SEO is not to make money. SEO is just one link in the chain of your money making process. The goal of SEO is to bring relevant traffic to relevant site pages from the search engines.

I would love to hear views on this. SEO’s are not all conversion rate experts, this is a completely different skill-set and the next link (after SEO) in your money making chain. Surely SEO KPI’s must be based on search engine traffic (quality and quantity) and not conversions. Why would you be held accountable to something you are not qualified to improve?

Great write up BTW :)

So there is some kind of hidden PR that is “real,” as opposed to the toolbar PR

Yes.

How is one to know what the real PR is

You can’t.

and does it really matter?

No it doesn’t. You’ll get real PageRank by having a great site that people discuss online. It doesn’t actually have a number associated with it.

Clients are obsessed with their PageRank and the number of links you can get them each month…. no matter how much you tell them to ignore the PR they will still be obsessed.

I can understand why there is an obsession with PageRank, but I am at a loss as to how to reassure people that relevance is more important and that sites with PR0 can still get top positions.

None of us can say for sure that they are given the same weight as text links, but I personally believe they do as long as they’re reasonable and not keyword stuffed (just like text links).

On competitors harming you, I asked this very question to Matt Cutts while chatting at SMX advanced. Basically, what I inferred from his discussion, is that Google uses a “scalpel” approach rather than a penalty approach. That is, they don’t penalize you for having bad links, they simply don’t count the bad links at all – this way you can’t do any benefit and your competitor can’t do any harm.

The one caveat is that people who build spammy links also do other things that are against the webmaster guidelines, so many SEOs may be associating those penalties with the much easier to identify spammy links. (correlation != causation)

I’d also recommend using canonical AND 301. 301 is more powerful, but canonical helps in those cases where you can’t control how others link to your site – especially your online media or paid search team and their tracking IDs.

Jill, I’m glad you said that about.gov domains. I’ve long been a proponent of saying “links from .edu and .gov don’t count more because they’re .edu and .gov, it’s simply that .edu and .gov have higher quality content, which gets more links, which gives them more pagerank” Good to hear people killing this myth, it’s one of the ones I hate most.

I was “ryan from dearborn” in many of the cutts webmaster help videos – and myths are what I tried to focus on. My goal is to get “decrees from Cutts” out there on as many myths as possible.

I would have loved to be on this panel. I think it would have been a blast. I’m sad I couldn’t make it to NY.