Ah, this event. In a previous post, I roughly wrote about and presented what the VLC (Visibility Live Camp) was. As a simple participant of this second edition, I didn't feel there were fewer people than the first.

New faces though. And to be perfectly honest, given the nature of the VLC, I was expecting some graphical improvements to the interface, a bit more life for the avatars. On that front, I was a bit disappointed. But that wasn't Raphael's fault - it was up to the VEXPO team to handle that, and the bugs didn't make their task easy.

The Conferences and Their Authors

Clearly, without sugar-coating it, some conferences were unnecessary while others were too short. In the era of Panda and Penguin updates, I'm tired of playing cat and mouse with Google, and Xrumer/Senuke-style automation no longer amuses me.

I'm increasingly looking to build for the long term, the real, the quality work.

Thursday Morning

On the first morning of the VLC, I enjoyed the first conference by Benoit Neuts who demonstrated with figures how important it is to think about smartphones and tablets when building websites today. Responsive, functional, usable with big fingers - a very interesting aspect. A must-check criterion for any audit.

Then Rudy Som talked about his method of creating thousands of sites quickly - mass domain purchases, CMS uploads, content posting, all via his tools. The information is that Rudy's tools will soon be available to everyone.

My Corsican friend Alexandre Santoni (Keeg) shared his approach to building site networks. Despite what I saw on Twitter, Rudy and Alex's methods are in my opinion completely opposite - their purposes and reasons differ fundamentally. Everyone has their own recipe.

Thursday Afternoon

Laurent Bourelly, our international rock star, talked about internal linking. For me, this conference should have lasted 3-4 hours easily. The subject is incredibly important. It was pure joy but ended too quickly. Laurent, I suggest you podcast yourself on this specific subject and tell us everything that needs to be said.

Florian Marlin spoke about Adwords Marketing. For someone like me, the subject is fascinating. I clearly need to learn more, and I unfortunately don't own the SEA grimoire from this great man.

Sylvain Peyronnet's conference was like quantum physics when we'd been doing basic math all morning. Ultra interesting and ultra important, but possibly too advanced for the rest of the program.

Sandrine closed the day, bringing us back to earth with practical advice about where to place links. Great common sense throughout. A pleasant and intelligent voice - a conference I'll definitely listen to again.

Friday the 13th - Morning

Poor Julien had to deal with VEXPO technical issues. A very interesting conference on website internationalization. Key takeaway: don't just think "English site" but Welsh, Scottish, American, etc. Important aspects to consider when internationalizing sites.

512Banque presented "Blackhat Linkbaiting" - essentially the art of making people believe they're eating Swiss chocolate when it's something else entirely. A very amusing and interesting spectacle combining cloaking and partial truths.

Jean-Francois Poussard talked about domain names and new extensions coming. Things are evolving and everyone is eager. I personally have 250 domains pre-reserved on Gandi. A fascinating conference about domain selling prices.

Friday Afternoon

Tiger's conference had an unexpected effect on me. His sincerity of tone is remarkable. Too short a conference, with too many unanswered questions. Paulo spoke from the heart. As he rightly said, anyone who claims they weren't hit by Penguin is a liar. There's no more black hat or white hat - just SEOs and a Google that says white one day and black the next.

Olivier Andrieu (the Pope of SEO) addressed topics that should have gone well beyond the allotted time - page crawling, helping crawlers navigate efficiently, Botify, Wattusibox. Everything about indexation, de-indexation, robots.txt - the DNA of our sites. I want to see Googlebot interact with my pages like Laurent saw two others doing during the VLC.

Beunwa closed the VLC talking about automation tools and scripts - iMacros, Zenno, cron jobs, and his own training.

Final Thoughts

I would have liked some conferences to last much longer and some not to be there at all. I hope the next session adapts content better to current realities. Responsive sites, internal architecture, intelligent net-linking, SEA - these are truly complementary themes for serious projects. A huge shout-out to Raph who has the talent to bring together this whole SEO world.