I’ve had a chance to talk in depth to several folks and will post that later, but wanted to check in before the session on “Is link buying evil” which will feature Matt Cutts from Google and some notable advocates for strategic link buying.    I’ve been surprised to hear from some really good SEO folks here that link buying still works well as part of their strategy, though I think they’d agree it’s very difficult to find the types of links that “work”, and from my perspective you always have a potential gun to your head from SE’s which do not like this practice.   So perhaps the best advice for most is to avoid link buying unless you want to live dangerously.

I had a nice talk at lunch today with Matt Cutts about his view on AI and  severak search themes but no time now to spell out the details.  

A key theme here is the number of SEM firms – many that seem fairly inexperienced.  Lanzone mentioned that it’s  increasingly common for large clients to buy out their SEM firm to bring it all in house and I think that may be a new strategy for the players in SEM.