My flight lands at LAS on Wednesday at 8:30p-ish….which should put me on the Strip just in time to be fashionably late for the SEOMoz party at the conference center. I’m seriously considering doing the whole change clothes/put make-up on/get ready thing in the limo after leaving the airport to minimize the amount of time it takes me to dump my luggage in the room and jet over to the conference center. If I could easily fly in my boots, I could just get dressed in Chicago and freshen up in Vegas, but it’s a pain in the butt to get my boots on and off when I go through airport security… much easier in slip-on flats. Less cute, but oh well. Anyway, I digress…

So here’s my schedule as it stands right this second…

• Saturday, December 1: Attending Toys for Tots 2007 party in Chicago
• Sunday, December 2: Pre-SES Chicago “networking” at Kitty O’Shea’s at the Hilton (on Congress)
• Monday, December 3: Remembering to call my dad to wish him a happy birthday; Working at the office; Playing it by ear in the evening… if there are any parties, let me know!
• Tuesday, December 4: Working at the office; No plans for the evening yet. May cry myself to sleep because I’m missing the fun in Vegas.
• Wednesday, December 5: At the office until 4:30p; Land in Vegas about 8:30p; Heading to SEOMoz party; Then ??
• Thursday, December 6: I’m covering the following sessions for Search Engine Roundtable:
  • 10:15-11:30AM Brand Management
  • 11:35AM-12:50PM Responsible Web Design
  • 1:30-2:45PM Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization
  • 2:45-4:00PM Competitive Intelligence
  • 4:00-5:30PM Organic Keyword Research and Selection

  And then, after marathon liveblogging all day (and probably whilst hungover), I’m going to play in the Purpose, Inc. SEO Poker Tournament at the Venetian with a bunch of SEO high rollers (including, but not limited to: the spousal unit of one Rhea Drysdale, Brent Csutoras, Pat Sexton, Frank Watson, David Mihm, Marcus Tandler [Hallo meinem deutschen Freund!] and the adorable BOTW boys) any one of whom could no doubt clean my clock in no time flat because I completely suck at poker… I’m practicing, but I doubt it will help much.

• Friday, December 7: PubCon! Then I have no clue… playing it by ear.
• Saturday, December 8: Flying home; Office xmas party in the evening.

And of course, because I’m a twitter-addict, I’ll be updating via twitter a bunch so please feel free to follow me. Also, I’m thinking there isn’t going to be a live SEO 101 on Thursday because Neo and I will be at PubCon, I’ll be live blogging sessions (I’m not sure what Neo’s plans are) and poor Brian is stuck in Omaha because… well… I’m sure you’ve heard us complain about that on the past few episodes.

Anyway, feel free to text message me or call — especially if you’ve got a line on a good party — if you’ve got one of my business cards, you’ve got my cell and I always have it with me. I finally remembered to upgrade to unlimited text messaging and free incoming, so it’s all good. See everybody next week!

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Cshel’s SES Chicago and PubCon plans

We spent a little big of time on the differences between SES, SMX and PubCon, and which conference we felt would be best to attend based on your knowledge level, overall responsibilities and business goals. Oh, and there’s a coupon code mentioned at the end of the show to get 10% off your registration for SES Chicago.

I should warn you that we encountered some technical glitches during the show (Brian’s office lost power and he got knocked off, and I was doing the show from a “borrowed” wireless connection that was a little flaky (I eventually just called in on a landline). All in all though, it was a good show :)

The important things to take away from this are:

1. Search conferences are definitely worth the price of admission (and airfare/hotel/food/bar) because the value of the knowledge you gain in that one week far surpasses what you can learn on your own through self-study in the same amount of time;
2. When pitching conference attendance to your boss, anticipating objections and questions and then having prepared answers, backed up by case studies and facts, goes most of the way toward getting his/her blessing and funding.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
SEO 101: Why search conferences are worth the time and money

Beginning SEO Podcast SMX Wrap-Up — Download the MP3

Brent Csutoras, Lisa Barone, Carolyn Shelby at MSN Party at SMX Advanced 2007

In the interest of keeping the topic focused on issues relevant to beginners, we discuss the tone and subject matter of SMX Advanced, and at what point in your learning curve you should consider attending. If you’re not to the point where you think you could hang with the big dogs of search, we also recommend some alternative conferences where you can catch more basic sessions and get up to speed.

For other stuff on SMX Advanced 2007, see:

• Long Overdue SMX Wrap-Up – moi
• Live Blogged Sessions from SMX Advanced – Search Engine Roundtable
• You’re all bright people… go do a search :P

[Photo: Brent Csutoras, Weird Asia News; Lisa "The Lisa" Barone, Bruce Clay; Carolyn "cshel" Shelby; Hanging out at the MSN sponsored SMX party on Sunday night]

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
SMX Wrap-Up on Beginning SEO Podcast

I im’d a friend of mine who used to work for Moniker and asked if he had access to, or if anyone from the registrar side had access to, the WHOIS info on private domain registrations. His reply was that “only registrars have access to the private domain registration information, but only for those domains they hold/manage”.

So, Google, although a registrar, does not have access to anyone’s private WHOIS info because Google doesn’t manage or handle registrations for the general public.

To confirm this, I also read ICANN’s “Preliminary Task Force Report on Whois Services” issued on 22 November 2006. If you look under Summary of task force discussion (including proposals for access to data) you’ll see the following:

There are two different classes of requests for registration information.

1) Requests for information about registrations that are managed through a private registration or registration proxy service (a “type 1″ request)

2) Requests for information for regular, non-proxy/non-private registrations. (a “type 2″ request)

These requests are typically dealt with differently by registrars.

Requests are typically taken in by a single point of contact at a registrar which liaises with or escalates to the registrars legal department or staff.

There’s other information in the report, but that’s the part that I think is the most clear. It confirms what my contact said, which is that registrars have access to the registration data for private registrations, but only for the domains they manage.

So, Google cannot see past private registration protection. That being said, it doesn’t mean webmasters are not being profiled. It just means they aren’t using special, non-public information to build the profiles. (See comments to my previous post)

Just an update… I know I’ll sleep better tonight. ;)

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Google cannot see past private registrations

What I had taken away from that was that Google is profiling webmasters, and when we hit a certain threshhold in terms of quantity and quality of domains registered, it flags us. Flags us as what? Okay, I don’t know that, and I’m fairly positive no one from Google is going to volunteer that information. However, I did speculate on the possible ramifications in my post the other day.

So on to the update…

Brian B., who was sitting with me at the session, commented on Matt Cutts’ recap and pointed out what I had suspected, which is that Google can see past privacy protection.

…you mentioned that you knew that this person owned 40+ sites, and afterwards when you clicked on the WhoIs info that they were all privacy protected. I think you just let it slip that Google has access to all the WhoIs info regardless of what is protected from public domain. That’s a pretty big statement to make and will probably make a lot of people nervous.

Um, yeah! Makes me nervous and I’m not even doing anything wrong. (I swear!) Matt replied to Brian and explained that he did not employ any voodoo or secret Google magic to determine that the domains the reviewee owned were all privacy protected…

You’re correct up to the whois speculation, Brian B. All I did was take one of the domains and run “whois domain.com” from a command-line and noticed that whois data privacy protection was on for that domain. Then I did the same with 1-2 more domains to verify it. So I wasn’t using any special Google data or tool for noting the whois info was private. Sorry if I gave that impression.

Matt knows that everything he says gets completely over analyzed so I’m sure he wants to quell any rumors before they start a hysterical panic. That being said (cshel places tin foil cap firmly upon her head and secures the chin strap) the sequence of events in that portion of the session make me think the checking the “regular” whois data for privacy protection was an after thought.

Let’s consider the following:

• Matt was giving the reviewee the business about his plethora of domain holdings for a good 5 minutes before the privacy thing got mentioned. I suppose that could be a coincidence…
• How would he have known which domains to check for privacy protection if he didn’t already have the list of domains associated with the reviewee’s business?

If the domains were all associated with the same owner via some other means, like they’re all hosted on the same server or subnet, all have the same name servers, etc. he still would have needed some tool or script that would have run out and collected all of that info quickly and in the manner he needed to make the connection.

I’ve sniffed out covert domain owners in a similar manner before, but it was a pain in the butt and took a long time to manually pick and choose which bits of information might lead me to other domains and contact information. I guess I’m just saying that he had a lot of information VERY quickly for not having a tool that did the leg work for him.

Also, while Matt protests that it’s not a special Google data, I might argue that technically, WHOIS registration data wouldn’t be “special Google” data anyway, as any company that is a licensed registrar would have access to it — and Google became a registrar in 2005 even though they don’t actually do domain registrations for anyone (besides maybe themselves). His statement isn’t false; however, his statement also doesn’t confirm or deny that Google has access to the private registration data.

Conspiracy theories are fun!

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Update to the “Anything You Reg” Post

Additionally, he made comments to the site reviewees about the types and quantities of domains regged and how well (or not) the extra domains relate to the site/topic in question, implying that the dozen or so unrelated domains were unnecessary at best and, at worst, possibly harmful to their SERPs.

Apparently, Google has some sort of magic ability to look at all of your domains at once, and uses this information to decide if you’re a dirty spammer or someone who is authoritative about their topic and therefore worthy of better rank. I can’t really decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

On the one hand, I can see where you might be inclined to devalue a site run by someone who owns a ton of keyword laden, hyphen riddled domains because that sort of indicates that he/she might, maybe, be an MFA’er or worse. But then again, there really isn’t any proof based solely on one’s domain holdings.

What if the person in question just went on a drunken registration spree one night (not that I’ve done that before, I swear), or maybe regged a bunch of domains with the plan to park them and offer them up for sale? Should their “real” sites be punished for that? I would seriously hope not.

So now, I’m sifting through my domain portfolio to make sure I’m not sitting on anything that might be held against my “money” site and hurt its rankings. If I do find questionable domains, I think I’ll be transferring the registration to my sister or possibly one of my cats, so they can’t be traced back to me anymore :-)

Related Posts:

• Update to the “Anything You Reg” Post
• Google cannot see past private registrations
• Google easing into domain business afterall

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Anything you register can and will be held against you…

The big problem here is that a lot of the convenient or choice places are booked solid for stays beginning on November 13th (the night before the conference begins). I have noticed a couple places DO have rooms if you set your first night to Tuesday, November 14th or later… but for me that’s going to suck to come in early enough on Tuesday morning to drop all my junk off at the hotel and still make it to the first sessions at the conference. (Ah well, I’ll figure it out.)

Please feel free to use the links below to book your rooms. 6% of your total room night cost is profit por moi, and I thank you in advance!

Conference Hotel — Renaissance Las Vegas
3400 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV

On Monorail Line/On Strip — Venetian Resort Hotel Casino
(If no rooms available, try this link for the Venetian instead.)

On Monorail Line/On Strip — Paris Las Vegas
On Monorail Line/On Strip – Aladdin Resort and Casino

On Monorail Line/On Strip — SKYLOFTS at MGM Grand
Across street from Monorail/On Strip – Bellagio

Need to Take a Cab — Red Rock Casino, Resort and Spa

• 11011 W. Charleston Ave, Las Vegas, NV

Red Rock *just* opened, and it’s run by the people who run the Green Valley Ranch and Resort in Henderson. I spent 5 WONDERFUL days at the spa at GVR last year, so I feel pretty confident that Red Rock is going to be just as nice.

Need to Take a Cab — Hard Rock Hotel and Casino

• 4455 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV

It’s the Hard Rock… it’s hip and has the coolest pool in Vegas (or so said a special I saw on the Travel Channel).

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
PubCon Vegas Hotels