Does conference attendance affect rankings?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Ryan in Dearborn, Michigan asks, “I haven’t been to any conferences yet this year, I don’t live in the valley, and I am not an attractive female. Will my rankings be negatively affected? What about my status in the SEO community?” Well, I can’t talk about your status in the SEO community, but your rankings won’t be negatively affected. There are still hope because there’s Twitter. So, you know, you could always rely on that to get to be known in the SEO community. But Ryan actually asked a lot of really good questions which I answered. So, I would like to think that merit is the way forward where people can judge you on the quality of what you do and as long as they can find out about you, that’s a good way to judge people as simply on the basis of the quality. So that’s something we try to pay attention to and hopefully the fact that we happen to answer a lot of Ryan’s questions means that he is not too unhappy that he doesn’t live in the valley and he’s not an attractive female. So, good luck with everything, Ryan.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: