I always find it difficult to begin conference recaps. To me, they always sound trite. They're the high school English class equivalent of the forced short stories that begin, "We packed up the car to go to the beach..." Thus, my complaining about beginning conference recaps is how I've chosen to start this one.

Luckily, there is plenty to talk about from SMX Advanced, and not all of the good stories originate at the Edgewater Hotel's bar. To summarise the current debate, there has been a bit of muttering that this year's show was too black hat for a leading search conference. Having spent most of the first day in the SEOmoz booth, I can't speak for most of those sessions, and I found Day Two's content entertaining and interesting.

Speakers told us to stop fearing Matt Cutts, his employer and the other search engines. Some also presented content that you won't find in an SEOmoz guide or the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Whether you take this advice is up to you, but it's nice to know some of the things SEOs are up to. I learned a lot this week. That doesn't mean I'm going to start... um... doing the things suggested at Give It Up. At the least, I'd never do so for a client, and I'd never recommend non-white-hat tactics in Q&A because that's not how SEOmoz does things and handing out black or dark gray hat advice to members would be wrong.

Just because you know how to do something or understand how it works, you don't have to implement any of it. In fact, I'd argue that you can't understand too much about your industry. And besides, we've managed to leave the world with the impression that every session and every presentation, including Give It Up, was black hat. That's not true at all. Not even close.

Again, I spent a fairly good amount of time at our booth and I didn't attend all the organic SEO sessions, at which most of these criticisms are aimed. It's also hard to address since Give It Up is the topic of the day here, and we can't write about what the panelists actually said for another twenty-eight days (and, if you were there, please avoid doing so in the comments).

Commenting in Lisa Barone's post about this topic, Danny Sullivan says, "I've literally been running through my head a "Have We Lost Our Way" post since Wednesday." and "It had content I was embarrassed to see presented, because it is not about the type of SEO I'd like people to learn or know about." I don't think Danny needs to be embarrassed: I hope that everyone at SMX recognises the downsides to risky SEO techniques and can make the distinction between what they should do for clients and what they can play with when they're the ones who stand to lose face and rankings.

The speakers I saw discussing gray or black hat stuff were also quite careful to explain their stance and emphasise that the tactics at hand weren't to be used on clients (unless, one supposes, the client asks for that specifically).

I also like the idea presented by overnight celebrity Darren in a recent post, where he points out that understanding black hat techniques is important if one of your clients falls victim to one of them. Love Darren or hate him, it's hard to argue that the first step to fixing a problem is understanding what happened in the first place.

All this said, SMX Advanced was never billed as a darker-hat-style conference and I can see why Danny is upset that it has received this tone of coverage. Our industry already has meet ups and conferences for that sort of content.
I'm just uncertain that we should get that upset about being offered information that people regularly keep quite close to their chests.

In other news, SEOmoz threw our (now annual) SMX Advanced party again this year, and it was another big success. I'm really judging "success" on whether or not I remember leaving the party, and it's a bit blurry, so it must have been another good one. Unfortunately, Chris Hooley was not around this year to provide a beer bong, but the function lived up to its reputation. We got to meet more PRO members "in real life", such as Kate Morris, Brent D. Payne and Richard Baxter. I got to embarrass myself by being thoroughly beaten by Brent, Tom, Will and Kate at bowling. If you weren't there this year, be there next time!

And the same goes for the conference as a whole. I don't believe those of you who weren't there should come away with the impression that it was a black hat show or that it violated some code of SEO ethics. It pushed people's limits, which is part of what "advanced" means. The negative press, both constructive and otherwise, will only make next year's installation better. Stop back in a month's time, and I'll tell you all exactly what I'm talking about.