Last month I was able to attend Friends of Search 2014 which was located in Amsterdam and it certainly was a brilliant event with some amazing international and Dutch marketers. The event was only one day, but it was jam packed with great sessions across two rooms. Friends of Search is a initiative of IAB.nl and DDMA.nl, and it was a great conference that was focused on presenting and sharing great marketing insights with the audience; and had no company promotional booths or sponsored sessions.
Some of the amazing speakers that presented included:
- Dixon Jones – MajesticSEO
- Barry Adams – TheTomorrowLab
- Bastian Grimm – Ads2people
- Joost de Valk – Yoast
- Marcus Tandler – OnPage.org
- Kevin Gibbons – BlueGlass.co.uk
- Cedric Chambaz – Bing
- Wouter de Rijk – Fonq.nl
- Kate Adams – Google AdWords
- Kaspar Szymanski – Xoogler
- Fili Wiese – Xoogler
Dixon’s session was great as it was the only data focused presentation, and focused on using the huge insight possible with Majestic SEO tools in his presentation on “Search Ranking Factors”. He highlighted how SEO tactics are changing but how some old favourites still seem to work after all this time. Dixon did put forward an interesting concept that there is more to a link than we actually realize, and explained in a bit more detail about the concept of Flow Metrics and Trust Flow. He highlighted a bit more around the Twitter Rankings research project done by his team last year for a Forbes article, and how all this data is available for free for the top 50,000 profiles.
It was also great to see some slides which showed how you can start to understand a little bit more about Google’s HummingBird algorithm, and how powerful it can be for brands & authority figures – based on Google’s improved understanding of context and natural language search.
You can find Dixon Jones’s full slideshare presentation below if you were unable to attend.
If you want to get some more background about what Dixon discussed at Friends of Search 14 you can watch a great interview with him below.
It was hectic, busy and a heap of fun for all FOS14 attendees, but attending the event also gave me an opportunity to meet and chat with Dixon Jones in person about Majestic SEO and what awesome things they have been working on. It also allowed me to hang out and chat with Jan-Willem Bobbink. Jan-Willem is one of the other Majestic SEO Ambassadors who is based just out of Amsterdam in Utrecht, and works for European marketing agency InternetAdvantage.nl. He also wrote up a detailed event review post which you can read here. Please note that it’s in Dutch so Google translate might make a bit of a mess of it. I have an epic post coming out in the next few days on SearchEngineJournal so stay tuned for that!
One final entertaining image was from the social beam TV that was tracking live tweets at several points in the day – I might have been over-sharing a bit too many Tweets with #FOS14!
As you can see in the image above, (taken of the live social media screens), I had made almost half of the total number of tweets being sent out about the conference – this made me feel proud and slightly embarrassed at the same time, which didn’t go unnoticed by Kevin Gibbons as per the tweet below. Kevin was also using a different hashtag at several points which did make it easier to dominate the stream.
@davidiwanow I thought that thing was your photostream?! #fos15
Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo) February 20, 2014
- Case study: Embed Majestic data into third party applications - January 4, 2017
- Congratulations to the SEMY Award winners in 2015 - March 26, 2015
- Friends of Search Amsterdam 2014 - March 5, 2014
That’s one of my more eloquent interviews on Youtube. Thanks David.
March 5, 2014 at 12:17 pmThanks Dixon I wished I could also take credit for the YouTube but not this time, maybe at the next event?
March 5, 2014 at 12:37 pmSorry my english not good, i dont understand what are u talkink about, i am new here, from Turkey, and i want to say, majesticseo site explorer tool is very very usefull, i can see deleted backlinks. I will advice majesticseo to my friends and i will be here everyday. Thank you.
March 10, 2014 at 9:00 pm