Google’s Matt Cutts spoke in a Q&A session with Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced this week, and discussed the Panda update, among other things. A lot of sites have been critical of Google for returning results that are scraped versions …

Google SEO vs Bing SEO has been a topic of discussion throughout the industry since Bing was launched. The topic got some heavy play last week at the SMX Advanced conference, and with Yahoo and Bing coming together sometime this year, online marketers are going to want to start thinking harder about incorporating Bing into their strategies if they are not already doing so.

Google’s recent algorithm update, nicknamed "Mayday" by webmasters got a lot of people riled up, as many claimed it seriously affected their rankings, and potentially their revenues.

Do you think the update has affected your revenue? Comment here.

Microsoft made some significant announcements related to Bing at SMX Advanced in Seattle. Later this summer, Bing will offer a redesigned version of Bing Webmaster Tools based on feedback from webmasters. The tools will provide webmasters with a simplified, more intuitive experience that delivers a comprehensive view of how Bing indexes their sites, a representative for Bing tells WebProNews.

 Highlights include:

WebProNews spoke with Google’s Matt Cutts out at SMX Advanced today. He talked a little about Caffeine, which Google just announced is complete, nearly a year after its initial announcement at SES, when Matt also spoke with us about it.

Brett Tabke was among the speakers on the ‘Mega Panel’ at SMX Advanced this year. This session essentially consists of a panel of established industry experts fielding questions from the crowd of conference attendees. It never takes long in these type of sessions to get a feel for what’s on everybody’s mind. This year, to the surprise of exactly no one, it was all things social media and Twitter that dominating the Q & A.

We made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in terms of the no-follow attribute.  These no-follow changes have some pretty significant implications for lots of things, first and foremost though it seems these changes are specifically geared to mitigate, to some degree, the effectiveness of PR sculpting.

When you are evaluating your website from an SEO/Indexing/Crawlability perspective there are a few things to keep in mind and some important questions you may not be asking yourself. What questions are you asking yourself? Share with WebProNews readers.

Abby Johnson of WebProNews had a nice chat with FindMeFaster’s Matt Van Wagner about PPC campaign strategies and ad copy at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle this week. For one, they discussed how to get a good quality score right from the beginning. Talk about your strategies for achieving a good quality score.

Companies that have made it this far should feel hopeful about the future; we may finally be coming out of the recession.  Not everything’s back to normal, though – just ask General Motors – and so if you’re in the position of needing to justify the use of paid search (or just wanting to get better at it), a session at SMX Advanced aimed to help.

PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link structures intended for sculpting.

As you may have read about by now, Google’s Matt Cutts participated in a fairly lengthy Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle. One interesting question that Matt got was about how webmasters should deal with display:none and AJAX without being penalized by Google.

Cutts recommends making sure that whenever you write your own mouseover code that you don’t roll your own custom solution, which he says might do some really weird things that nobody else has done before.

WebProNews is of course attending the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, and Abby Johnson spoke with Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance, about the effect the economy has had on keyword usage. Have you noticed differences in keyword trends? Share your experiences here.

In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google’s Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He was asked several questions about this.

Google recently announced it is now reading javascript and acting upon it. In the past, the advice given out has been if you have paid links, you should either nofollow those paid links or use javascript because Google didn’t read it.

With Bing officially launching today, senior program managers from Microsoft discussed the new decision engine in the session "Bing: A New Approach to Internet Search."

Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.

In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google’s Matt Cutts was asked the following question:

How does Google look at the issue that I can buy suspect links and point them to my competitor? How does your algorithm track that?

From the playground to the boardroom, "prove it" is the annoying phrase with which a lot of innovative ideas are met.  However, if you’ve been tasked with proving the value of social media (to either a boss or to yourself), the contents of an SMX Advanced session should help.

In the session "Time To Think Seriously About Mobile Paid Search?," the speakers focused on mobile paid search opportunities and strategies for search marketers.

Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.

Though a large percentage of created Twitter lay dormant—one study found 10 percent do 90 percent of the tweeting—that isn’t stopping aggressive and forward thinking marketers from squeezing every last drop of utility out of it. A pair of the top social media and search marketers in the country think the last thing a marketer should do is take Twitter lying down.

Finding the right keywords to use leads to good SEO. At SMX Advanced session "Keyword Research Artistry" the panel offered tips on effectively leveraging keywords.

Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.

The SMX Advanced conference is coming up next week in Seattle, Washington. It will take place on June 2nd and 3rd, and WebProNews will be there to cover it both days.

Rand Fishkin blogged about the little bits of secrets discussed at a session of the recent SMX Advanced conference; the session centers on some of the tips and tricks that aren’t widely known in search marketing.