Calendar
Network
Feeds
Vingold
I've lived in Hawaii. Yeah, you can go the beach on Christmas - but it just ain't the same.
I'm like Jim and Nick. Give me the seasons (in equal parts) and it makes the year go by so much slower.
I wonder if a weather disclaimer was part of the employment contracts.
Obviously, a few days later and we're still talking about this - so here we go:
1) The site is not doing anything wrong. They submitted their URL and their preferred anchor text to lots of directories. I always thought this was a basic link building practice. Up until October 3rd it was even recommended by Google guidelines. So in my eyes they should be able to withstand a manual review. For all we know they could be a good SEO company. Not all of the world's best SEOs speak at conferences and comment at Sphinn.
2) The search phrase "SEO Company" is so generic that any of the search engines should be able to serve up any of a hundred different websites and feel they delivered a relevant result to the user. The search results in this case aren't much different than cabs at the airport. So in my eyes this site even passes the Shoemoney "Don't Make Google Look Stupid" Rule.
3) If you watch the most recent "What is Web Spam" video from the SMX East Panel you'll hear all the search engines describe their opinion of web spam, and again this site doesn't meet any of that criteria.
4) Rand did intend to "out" the company. And we need to stop saying he didn't. He posted the blog under the "Blackhat and Spamming" category of the blog. He used the phrase "you know I don't lightly call out manipulative activities in the search results very often" to indicate he was about to do so. Of course he later went on to say his real problem wasn't with the site, but with the search engines and that the site was not doing anything that would "technically" be called blackhat. But by then his intention and his "outing" was clear. He even concluded the post with ways you can report web spam on your own.
Note: If submitting your URL to sites for them to post with your preferred anchor text is blackhat, then I don't think there are any whitehat SEOs.
5) Rand could have, if he chose to, posted nearly everything he did and featured Linkscape as he did with a slightly different view. He could have titled it "Link Building, Low Level Directories Can Still Help You Rank (for now)" and put it under the link building category of the blog. He could have used 99% of what he did and just changed a few words or sentences. He didn't, his outing this time was intentional.
6) I think Rand's post shows there is a disconnect between how we would like to think the search engines work - and how they actually work. Rand talks of building a site with "ideal" SEO in mind and knowing one day that Search Engines will catch up and do it right.
Sometimes it is like this.
I can spend all night at a bar talking to a girl, laughing at her jokes, telling her she's beautiful, asking about her hopes, dreams, childhood etc. - and generally treating her with the respect, care and attention she deserves.
Come closing time she is still going to go home with the scruffy biker for a one night stand.
I also like and respect Rand and everyone over at SEOmoz, but this is my big takeaway from everything over the last month:
"Not ranking high enough? Buy Linkscape and you too can report your competitors as being spam - even if they aren't - by calling attention to all of their "low quality" or other "suspicious" links.
Report your findings using your Webmaster Tools console, or write a post on Sphinn or YOUmoz about them. Google will have to take action and all of your competitors will be removed from above you - thus clearing the path for your rise to top of the rankings.
And we've made Linkscape virtually escape proof, no site will be able to hide their backlinks from us, even if they remove themselves from our index. So you know you'll be able to find out about your competition - no matter who they are.
Buy Linkscape today! Before your competitors do!"
And you know what, it will probably work.
Arms dealers sell to both sides by convincing them that war is coming, and you better be armed.
Pure genious if you ask me.
I don't begrudge anyone their success, Rand has his own future and a beautiful wife he needs to take care of. I am sure at the heart of it all - this is a pure business decision.
I was trying to stay out of this, but as Annie pointed out there seems to be a bit of ambiguity going on. And I just want to be clear.
If I put the following at the top of every html file on www.vinnygoldsmith.com:
META NAME="SEOMOZ" CONTENT="NOINDEX"
What, if anything, will people be able to see about my site? Links in? Links out? MozRank? Nothing at all?
I really thought it would remove it all together and people wouldn't be able to see anything about it, but some of the words you're using "we will still show links to that URL" are giving me pause.
"In order for that to happen, though, we'd need to build a site verification service like Google & Live's Webmaster Tools."
Honestly, after you've indexed the web, building something like a site verification program to allow people opt out - should be a relatively easy project.
I don't know how much of my websites' linking relationships should be private as opposed to public, especially since it can be argued that is already available to whoever has the resources, energy and inclination to go looking for it.
But I am thinking that unless I am getting a benefit from it - I probably don't want it to be readily available to my competitors.
Skitzzo said this on the other thread:
If something like this happened once or twice, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt but it's become a pattern of behavior with SEOmoz.
1) Controversy
2) Benefit from attention
3) Apologize but due to time can't fix it just yet.
4) Continue to gain attention.
5) Finally fix it and explain how aw shucks guys, I didn't mean it like THAT.
6) Ask people to talk to you about it in person rather than writing about it in public.
Rand, when you say:
"site verification shouldn't be terribly hard, but we have a long dev timeline already, so that work is going to be at least a few months away."Does that mean we're at #3?
99.99% of the time all of the SEO drama means nothing to me, but for some of my sites a lot of work went into the link building, testing and verifying which anchor text works best, etc.
For someone to be able to just come along and copy it - I don't know, I guess that's your right to sell it to them, but it doesn't sit well with me. It certainly brings up a lot of ethical questions.
I was really hoping that opting out would be a lot more cut and dry than putting a meta tag with your company name on every single html file on my websites.
The best metaphor I can come up with is this:
I invite myself to your family reunion. Everyone you are related to is there, its a big gathering so I go unnoticed.
I then casually go around to all of your relatives and ask them about their medical history as I piece together a family tree.
I then also go to your doctor's and bribe them for information about your family's medical history as well, and I dig up some publicly available info like death certificates to round out my files.
Now, once I got all of that I come to you and offer you a complete breakdown of all of your potential medical issues that are based on heredity, genetics, etc.
Believe it or not, even though I got it without your permission, you might be ok with it and maybe even willing to pay for it. It does have some value after all.
But would you want me selling that to someone else? And you might be upset that I collected it without you knowing.
I then come to you and say that I'm not unlike the hospital - they have all of this information but it is hard to put it all together the way they have it. (Google is the hospital in this metaphor).
You could argue the hospital is giving you something in return (good health, proper care, etc.) and that you don't want this information available to just anyone for sale.
How would you feel if I said your only option for me not to sell this information is if you put a sign that says "vingold" up in the window of your home?
@KenJones
Honestly, I think at a site/domain level the information available is ... ok. For the sites I looked at (my own, clients and competitors) I don't think it is anything earth shaking. I think it would be neat to play around with, and to spy on a few competitors who continually outrank me, but I don't think I'm willing to pay for that just now.
I think the biggest strategic value of Linkscape is the aggregate information it makes available to SEOmoz. It can provide a pretty good approximation of some pretty nifty statistics. Some of which Rand has already revealed (% of internal to external links, % of no-follows, etc).
I think the deeper you slice and dice that data the better understanding you have of what a typical link profile might look like for an average website and where the extremes of that profile might be. That knowledge can be handy for anyone building links either ethically or not, because it will let you know approximately where the search engines' radar might be.
In my opinion, that information alone gives SEOmoz a competitive advantage at the top of this industry. It will be interesting to watch if other SEO companies follow suit and whether we'll have a whole host of bots to block using Meta tags.
@Rand
I've said my peace. Thanks for listening.
Rob, I agree that the comments between two of the people were just going round and round and that no conclusion was going to be reached between the two parties. But in my opinion other people were adding comments of value.
Even though the story had been submitted for a while, the first comment was posted about 24 hours before you closed it.
Your closing of it it so early is the same as saying that anyone who had anything to say about it would have done so within those 24 hours (Sat night to Sunday).
It seems to me, that by closing the comments so early, that you short changed the community a little bit.
I give a girl money to sleep with me and it is prostitution.
I buy a girl a fancy gift and she sleeps with me because she likes the gift and it is just like most evey other relationship.
Could it be that easy?
This is a great list, and the perfect primer for a beginning writer who wants to find just the right title to pique interest and generate clicks, diggs or sphinns!
Once again a great job Ms. Smarty!
Interestingly enough I was at a party this weekend and I discovered that an acquaintance (the husband of a friend of a freind) also does SEO. It was the first time I randomly ran into someone who did SEO out in the real world.
It turns out, him and his partner do offer this kind of service to their business clients. We talked a bit about whether it was a reliable business model for him to build these kinds of content networks - and I told him it was probably ok for now, but once you're discovered you should expect a smack-down.
Maybe I should send him this story.
I agree with all of the above: For my own personal side projects and throw-away sites do I do this? I'm not saying I do, I'm not saying I don't.
But I don't know if I could recommend it to a client.
Good job Slightly Shady!
Not that I do this, but I like subdomains for building manufactured links, and I like subfolders for everything else.
I think you get more link weight back from a subdomain. For instance services.performancing.com gets oodles of links back from the main blog site of performancing.com.
I imagine their rankings for their services page would be a lot less if the links from the main site pointed to a subfolder instead of a sub-domain.
Very interesting. I'm tempted to investigate this for a handful of clients I feel may have done some... umm... slighty shady stuff in the past.
It would be nice if the site links were always there and you could find them with a little manipulation. That way you could easily demonstrate to a client what is happening. But I guess Google has their reasoning for taking them away.
Story: Uber SEO Company
My favorite from the "Testimonials" page:
"They did some consulting for us and we are very impressed! These guys know tech words that we cannot even find... anywhere!" -Linda T.
OMG - Exceptional post and submit. I'd like to add that it would help if your web pages all have working links and things don't look weird when looking at them.
Recently, I was advised when talking to a doctor that I had to book an appointment for my son using a web interface - as it was the only option. When I went to it, it looked out of date a few links didn't work and it had a very clunky interface (very web 1.0)
Needless to say - as the appointment approaches I'll be calling a real person to confirm it actually went through.
Of course, I shouldn't throw too many stones - I like to think I respond to e-mails and phone calls quickly, but my web stuff is in need of some much overdue TLC. I need to take a few long weekends and shine them up a bit.
Alright - I gave it a Sphinn, and very quickly:
I'm right on #1, you're wrong. Planning matters. You don't have to plan to death every detail, but have an idea which direction you want to steer the ship.
I'll give you #2, when it comes to getting links good ideas count more than just words in a row- although I've seen plenty of words in a row sites outrank absolutely brilliant ideas.
On #3, I don't think Search Engines care about Usability, Site Design, etc. So all those might help in actually converting random traffic to paying customers - sure, I'll give you that. But for search engines - no, I'm right again. :-)
Even though this was picked up just this last week, I wrote this over a year ago and posted it to my blog back in Feb. So I know Google has continued their borg-like dominance of the web since then. But they still aren't everybody - yet (although I may name my next dog Google: "come Google", "fetch Google", "sit Google, stay"). So we'll call #4 too early to be determined.
As for #5, your point is well made and I will actually concede this one to you as well. You shouldn't post just to be fresh or first. Very well done.
As for #6, if you're willing to stop when you reach the top - then please do ;-)
Although I am sure it was done mostly tongue-in-cheek - good article/rebuttal, I'm going to try to remove the no-follow on it later - or give you a link somewhere else if I can't!
Unfortunately, I caught this too late. I knew I had to re-do all my permalink structures, but I thought I had more time. Now I have inbound links all to the wrong permalinks.
« previous1 next »
Story: Light Behind The Changes At We Build Pages