Michael, you're absolutely right. It's Google's fault. Just like it's Hostess Foods fault for making their Twinkies so delicious that that one guy couldn't stop eating them and he went crazy and killed people.

Leaving ethics out of aspects of your life is how we get into bad situations in the first place. But that's a totally different discussion so I won't start that rant.

"To live outside the law, you must be honest."...Bob Dylan

Seeing the darker side presented at conferences is good not because there is an implicit recommendation that you should go out and do it. Rather, when you see an alternative viewpoints, you can combine it with what you are currently doing and that causes you to think and perhaps improve upon your current methods, whatever shade of color they are. You aren't going to improve in the art of SEO if you see presentations of material that is already familiar to you.

I guess that my Give It Up presentation was one of those that you considered Black Hat, although half of the speakers gave up information that I would class as White Hat (Rand, Michael and Marty).

We clearly stated that some techniques should not be used on brand sites, and a number of people in the audience would have been affiliates and small biz owners looking to learn alternative techniques (dozens of people approached me afterwards and said so). I wouldn't use the techniques I presented on a FTSE/Fortune 250 client, although the fact is that they work and result in good rankings, traffic and income.

Advanced SEO doesn't have to be Black Hat, although the simple matter is that Black Hat SEO is at the cutting edge of the industry. Do you think that Bruce or Matt were the first to think of and implement PageRank sculpting, or was it a group of Israeli Black Hats that I saw doing it on poker sites a few months after the nofollow tag was brought in? It only became "White Hat" once Matt gave it the thumbs up 2-3 years later.

Personally, I wouldn't class site architecture as an Advanced topic - this should be SEO 101 and I'd be disappointed if someone in our field could not create the perfect site and content schematic.

Lisa, please don't take my comment as defensive. I've literally been running through my head a "Have We Lost Our Way" post since Wednesday. I'd have loved to have heard from you before you posted only so I could agree with much of what you said from the start -- that this is really heavily on my mind. I'm saying it more from being disappointed not to join from the start rather than "oh no, I have to react."

I'm torn between finishing that post I mentioned but likely will leave it until next week. I'm pretty worn out from the show, plus I wanted a little more time to reflect on some things.

I guess the short story of what I'm working on is like this. When I started writing about SEO, you'll remember my guide was called "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines." It was all designed for designers, developers and others who had to run web sites and needed them to be "search engine friendly," a term which if I didn't coin I certainly helped popularize. Search engines were like browsers, I long explained, and you want them to be accessible because of the traffic they can deliver.

The first time I ever saw a doorway page, I was shocked. It simply never occurred to me to make up content out of the blue to pull in traffic -- I was all about "optimizing" existing content that had a purpose in the first place. I was more shocked when I had several search engines say doorway pages were perfectly fine.

And so it goes, made even more complicated by the issues with linking. Consider that I get a designer or developer all educated about why Flash or Silverlight just ain't good for the search engines and they figure out how to do all the accessibility and on-site SEO things they need to do.

That alone should bring them more traffic -- just doing that alone. But then you know what? Someone or somehow within the organization, people still want more. And they hear it's all about the links. And then they start worrying about whether they should be doing more with internal linking and siloing or sculpting. Which, if you recall from when Nathan asked the audience, many people are doing but few actually think does anything.

Who knows? Well, the search engines know. Oh, but I can't even get Matt to give me a straight answer when I ask him like three times to say if all the links pointing at a root domain help pages within the domain do better. Meanwhile, this war on paid links goes on, where some people think you need them, other people think you don't and some of those links may or may not pass credit anyway, depending on where they are linked from, how they are done and if they are caught.

And we lose our way. You might love siloing, but to me, that's losing our way. I shouldn't have to be thinking about what links get "credit" or not on my pages. I should be able to do things that largely make sense for humans and trust that the search engines will do the right thing (and for humans, it means you naturally link to "right" pages on your site -- and if you have a About link on every page, they ought to be smart enough to discount that without me having to slap a nofollow on it).

That's what I want to work on -- how it all does start (to me) with having a great site, one that's accessible and building from that. This is definitely what I want taught, and it's the foundation that everyone should have. From that foundation, people can then go forward to learn other things that are being done and make their own decisions on what they may or may not want to do.

Perhaps I assumed too much of attendees, though. I mean, it doesn't occur to me that anyone at an advanced conference would think advanced SEO means link building as opposed to good site architecture because to me, if you're an advanced SEO, you already know the importance of being search engine friendly. I wouldn't have thought people would get these things so confused, but clearly some did. And I'm sorry for that and really take it to heart that I have to find a better way to ensure people are both getting a good mix of content as well as better education about stuff that might be risky. I still think anyone can benefit from understanding from some of the risky things that happen out there, but really my goal isn't to be doing a conference that's dominated by that stuff. I'll have to work harder at it.

On analytics, by the way, I also agree -- that's why we had "Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know" as one of the panels :)