Day One was a good one here at SMX East. From an SEO perspective there were several good sessions that provided SEO professionals with useful information. Here are some brief notes on a couple sessions I attended. Hopefully you will find these notes worthwhile.

The information on PageRank sculpting was very useful and it is interesting to hear the latest info on how SEOs are accomplishing the sculpting task. One little nugget to take away is not to remove nofollow links. Dropping these links has actually proven detrimental. Practitioners should also pay close attention to site architecture. Build your website correctly the first time and PageRank will flow as you intend.

The session regarding duplicate content was also interesting. From the sound of things, the search engines prefer to discover and deal with duplicate content on their own. The Google engineer actually mentioned that Google does not punish a site for posting duplicate content. I would caution you that even though Google has made this statement I recommend you do not leave the duplicate content selection up to Google.The duplicate content session also had quite a bit of discussion around the canonical tag. The tag looks like this: . These tags are currently being read and processed by Google. Yahoo and Bing are both testing the effectiveness of the tag and plan to utilize it fully by the end of the year.

That is it for Day One. If you would like to keep up with our notes in a more real time format then please follow 15miles on Twitter.