This week we’re at Pubcon Las Vegas, which is, regarded one of the largest SEO and Internet Marketing conferences in the world.

Today’s keynote address was with Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, regarding Google’s “State of the Index for 2011”

Matt opened his presentation by referencing a comment Leo Laporte made during his keynote, which was  “SEO was dead”.

Matt related if you took all the times people asked him if he thought that SEO was dead all we would have walking the planet would be a bunch of zombies.

Matt explained that SEO has evolved and isn’t the same as it was back in 2000 when all you needed to do was add some keywords to your meta tags.

Today SEO is all about coaching.

Search Engine Optimization is all about human nature by providing the best user experience for our audience.

Matt related that last year Google listened to the concerns expressed by webmasters and users at Pubcon that Google’s SERPS were becoming spamy and it was hard to communicate with anyone within the Google-Plex.

Matt explained that last year during Pubcon his team was focused on removing the Malware sites that were being listed in the Google SERPS.

Matt related that Three of Google’s long-term goals are focused on Mobile, Local and Social.

Here are 10 other “Gold Nuggets” that we took away from today’s Pubcon keynote:

1. Google is “looking” at giving the content that appears above the fold more weight in Google’s algorithm.
2. Google’s algorithm is much smarter today and it now indexing java widgets and is looking for more signals of social mentions.
3. Google wants to be more transparent about their algorithm updates. Last year there were over 500 changes and they will start announcing them as they are implemented.
4. The Google SERPs will be becoming more personal in the coming months as it ingrates more social signals from the web.
5. Google will communicate more with webmasters regarding outdated software, malware and other issues regarding their website(s).
6. The Google Panda algorithm has been successful at identifying and removing spammy sites. However there have been cases when good sites have been penalized. The Google webmaster forum has a listing of over 500 sites that webmasters feel have been unjustly penalized. A team member does remove these sites and if found it was de-indexed in error, they will make the necessary changes to the algorithm.
7. SSL (secure search) is another priority for Google, allowing those who do use SSL to keep their search private.
8. Links from press releases have been discounted. However news stories published in the news about your website/business are still important.
9. Using doorway pages on your website can get your website, domain, subdomain or a particular section of your site banned.
10. As Google Analytics is not tracking keywords in SSL, however  you can now download your top 1,000 queries from Google Webmasters.

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Are you attending Pubcon? If so what are some of your biggest take-aways from this years conference.