"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone Except Me Should be Open
Being labeled as open or transparent is a great public relations strategy. Executed effectively it gets ditto heads to feel like they are part of a movement and spread your propaganda.
However actually being transparent is often a poor business strategy.
Claiming to run an open auction, while running obfuscated quality metrics that price gouge advertisers.
At the same time Google is trying to push social sites to offer transparent data, they decided to block some Google search referral data (unless you are paying for the clicks, then you get that data).
When planning some of the features behind Google+ one of their employees wrote a book about the social circles concept with Google's blessings. Then, after he wrote the book, Google revoked permission to publish it!
Nuking affiliate links of some websites & then investing in Viglink, a network that automatically turns links into affiliate links.
Burning some networks of websites for being doorway pages & then investing in the Whaleshark Media roll up & launching Google Places.
Nuking some UK financial comparison sites for link buying & then buying BeatThatQuote.
Suggesting 60 or 90 days of penalty is a reasonable penalty for sketchy links & allowing BeatThatQuote to rank 2 weeks after penalizing it without cleaning up any of the paid links.
Android is open but internal Google emails revealed that carriers were getting wise to Google using compatibility as a club.
Not sharing revenue share stats with AdSense partners for a half-decade.
When websites are nuked they are frequently given no explanation. Worse yet, their content often re-appears in the search results on some other domain that stole it, in many cases while being wrapped in AdSense ads.
Arbitrarily making it hard to export AdWords campaigns to other services (& making it against the TOS to do same via the API).
The Panda update was needed to rid the web of garbage content. And yet Google is pre-paying Demand Media to post videos on YouTube. Since the Panda update downstream Google traffic to YouTube has more than doubled & YouTube is serving over a trillion streams per year!
Calls for "transparency" in SEO may sound great on their face, but once you peal back the covers the absurdity is laughable. If Google didn't discriminate against certain types of players & if Google didn't compete in the very markets that it judges then perhaps transparency would be a good idea.
However Google is perhaps the single biggest direct competitor in many markets, so to be fully transparent with them when they are the opposite with you is a naive business strategy:
I also disagree that outing each other would make the industry less like a mafia, because SEOs aren't the mafia. SEO is a symbiotic marketing channel reliant on Google, until the next big search engine/method comes along. In a mafioso analogy, Google would be the mafia - as they control the market. Removing all webspam wouldn't necessarily create better search results or a fairer market, as Google still decides who wins and who loses. The biggest winner being Google itself, the next level being their friends.
Secrecy is also the cornerstone of all marketing channels. Social Media for instance works in a similar way to SEO, except they have secret voting methods rather than secret linking methods. You don't see major social media companies outing a rival's voting methods, as it would shine a torch on their own methods. Even outside of marketing, McDonalds probably worked out KFC's magic blend of herbs and spices decades ago, but it's not in their best interest to tell everybody.
Outing webspam helps an SEO blog to keep their UVs up and their VCs happy. It helps a failing newspaper to appear modern and edgy, whilst allowing the contributor to launch a protection racket off the back of another company's misery.
Do You Want SEOs to Seem More Professional?
How often do you see tier-1 public relations firms marketing themselves by smearing other PR firms?
The question is less whether black hat and webspam are a good thing or not, but if Google is the unbiased and benevolent instance who shall make the rules. Google is a business and persuits its very own interestes, since it is aware of its market power with a lot of arrogance, aggresivity and obviously double standards. That was also Aaron's point, but seomoz has been missing the point completly in the last time.
I expect an SEO portal/community to focus on how stuff actually works/can work, not to propagate how the monopolist does it want to work. It is their risk of doing business if they decide for an algorithm, not ours. It is our risk however, to decide whether to stick to the rules or not. And it's not only about ethics but has several practical implications...
Full Disclosure Required, Except From Us
On paid links Google claims to require machine AND human readable disclosure. Then on their own site they use an ad color background that literally fades to white on many monitors. Maybe it is legitimate that they are only able to fool some of the users some of the time. But some of their ad initiatives have 0 disclosure at all. None.
You wouldn't know by looking at it, but according to the WSJ it is: "Google lists booking links to the airlines as advertisements, but the company declined to comment on how much money it makes from the arrangement."
There is no disclosure that you are in a paid ad funnel until the very last click. And those who fail to pay are either unlisted, listed last, or have a broken booking process where their brand is arbitraged in an attempt to flip the click to somewhere else. According to Leocha, “Google and the airlines have a sweetheart deal with each other, and the consumers are getting screwed.”
In the hotel market Google is also testing comparison ads & price ads.
Notice how little they care about relevancy so long as they keep the click on Google or are paid for the referral. They rank the car rental company Avis as a top Las Vegas hotel! And even the ad links that are sold off of that do not line up. Priceline pushes the Plazzo Luxury Suites & Booking.com pushes the Venitian.
Retarding Investment in the Search Ecosystem
What do you suppose the above behavior does to cash flow & multiples of websites in that vertical? Of course it contracts them & retards investment. Who wants to start a new hotel website at this point? What other verticals have investment held back by the fear of Google's eventual entry?
If you only had to manage competing against other market competitors & staying inside Google's editorial guidelines then investment isn't that difficult, but if you have to stay within Google's guidelines in the short term yet try to build a business that is sustainable even after Google enters & destroys the market it is far more difficult.
Skimming the Cream
At any time Google can enter any market and skim off the cream: "An independent study from Leads360 showed consumers using Google’s comparison ads converted better than any other lead provider."
Other affiliate networks which do not own the search channel have to fight through quality issues if they try to build similar scale.
A Self-serving Bias You Can Count On
When Google enters a market it might buy out a competitor, buy out a supplier, bundle, use predatory pricing, grant themselves superior search placement, adjust the relevancy algorithms and/or editorial guidelines, violate IP, scrape 3rd party content, work with sketchy advertisers & publishers to undermine competing business models, or any combination of the above.
They are rarely transparent with their interests when they enter a market. Almost everything is labeled as "a beta" and "just a test." They promise to "act appropriately" & you may not be aware of the steamroller until you are under it.
I recently read a blog post about how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can't state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.
A Google spokesman said "applications that are installed without clear disclosure, that are hard to remove and that modify users' experiences in unexpected ways are bad for users and the Web as a whole."
The business model of "violate & then buy protection" has helped lead to a protection-racket styled marketplace in patents that makes the risk of innovation for smaller players so expensive that it drives them under.
Where Google has gained a dominant position in a marketplace they can begin misdirecting for profit. Let's say you link to your own location on Google Maps to drive traffic to Google & help your users locate your office. Well in some cases they then reciprocate by confusing users by putting an ad in your location bubble.
Once again, you are forced to buy your own brand unless you teach your customers (and prospective customers) to avoid Google products.
Sure I May Have Failed, But at Least That Failure Was Transparent...
If you are fully transparent against an arbitrary set of guidelines when the company that judges you also competes against you & brushes up against the limits of the DOJ & FTC then you might lose for no reason other than being transparent. And not only are you competing directly against Google, but the algorithms are biased toward certain players.
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody — no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional — has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.
But when Google launched their Panda algorithm they did the same thing.
You might get smoked by a Panda update or have your accounts arbitrarily frozen while operating at a 7 out of 10 level, and then you see Ask is Google's biggest advertiser, their arbitrage gets a pass, & that feed even monetizes misspelled searches for Google's brand. ;)
For many businesses the unknown Panda risk is every bit as damaging as the great firewall of China. Each additional unknown kills x% of small new online businesses. If unemployment is high, companies are not hiring & the bar for self-employment is too high then the web stagnates.
If the old established corporate competition needs to be as good as you to compete then there is little risk to being transparent if the competition is doing nothing beyond following you around. But if the playing field is tilted and the competition only needs to be 5% as good as you are to beat you (and can easily come from behind to copy any success you have) then full on transparency brings much more risk than potential profits.
You Are the Ad
We are moving into a media world where the content becomes ads & even how people interact with the ads and content becomes a part of the ad.
Every time you view a page and click an ad (or even don't click an ad) you are feeding highly personal data back to Google. And they will use it as they wish. Here they are saying thousands of people like eBay, which is of course plenty reasonable, except for the fact they claim the people voted for that specific page rather than the site as a whole.
What's worse is that sometimes they will put your picture next to a listing and claim that YOU PERSONALLY voted for a specific page & use that to market that item to your friends and contacts. The problem with this is that:
even after you remove the vote for a site they still keep showing it
you may vote for site A & they will show your image as voting for site B
when they show your picture they claim you voted specifically for the page being advertised (even if that page is promoting a scam or something else you wouldn't endorse)
Once again, I will highlight that they use the votes against the wrong sites & pages and that they keep showing the votes even weeks after you remove them.
Where is the transparency in that deceptive crap?
Others Are Just as Bad, But Are Not Monopolies
But Aaron, you are just being hard on Google, why don't you ever mention Ask or Yahoo! or Bing?
Yahoo! offers a useless "buying guide" for fish tanks that is nothing more than a paid pointer to Overstock.com.
If you click on their coupons tab on that fish tanks search Yahoo! shows you coupons for tank tops, which is pretty idiotic.
Why is this Yahoo! Shopping & Yahoo! Deals product so ugly? They outsourced it years ago. So it is a non-product & thus the integration can't be anything but crappy.
Why do Yahoo! & Bing typically get a pass? They own a fairly low search marketshare. Missing traffic from either or both of those is certainly significant enough to be felt, however even when they are combined it is still less than half of what Google controls in most markets. Market leaders are expected to operate in less conflicted & less self-serving ways than also ran players in their market do. If Microsoft would have had 10% or 15% marketshare for their operating system then it is unlikely their browser bundling would have come under such scrutiny.
Transparency in The Real World
In the past I highlighted how every form of media is manipulated in Why Outing is Bad, but I thought it would be fun to run through some other markets and highlight how transparency often exists only as an illusion (to lure in punters so they can be rooked).
TrueCar aimed to make that market more transparent by giving consumers pricing data online to remove some of the asymmetrical advantage dealers have & makes the sales process smoother for consumers. How does the automotive market respond? Honda issued threats to their dealers & now TrueCar has a hate video ranking for their brand.
This nontransparency is not something new, but rather the way it has always been.
It exists at every level of society. Countriesspy on one another & companies may chose to show different views of the world to different markets.
News International’s leading profit centre, the News of the World, was dependent on a very ugly culture of lawbreaking, hacking and impunity. This freewheeling, ask-no-questions attitude spread to other parts of the organisation, such as the Times and the Sunday Times, both of which used have used illegal or unethical techniques. Even more troubling, when senior News International management were confronted with evidence of wrongdoing, the company made false statements and took actions which prevented key evidence from reaching the public domain.
Both cases involve News America Marketing, an obscure but lucrative division of the News Corporation that is a big player in the business of retail marketing, including newspaper coupon inserts and in-store promotions. The company has come under scrutiny for a pattern of conduct that includes below-cost pricing, paying customers not to do business with competitors and accusations of computer hacking.
Were The Robber Barons Transparent?
Going back into history it is sort of hard to pick a starting point (one can go to the spice trade & orders that are unsealed at sea, or likely earlier than that) but to pick a somewhat recent starting point, we could look at the railroads:
So how did unnecessary, inefficient railroads get built? Because of government subsidies. In short, the federal government paid to build the railroads through massive financing subsidies and also gave them ample land grants. The trick to building a railroad was not knowing anything about railroads or even about business; it was having friends in Washington who could give you the right financing and land subsidies.
Even then, the railroads lost money. Not only was there insufficient demand for their services, but they were run by people who were generally incompetent. (For one thing, they didn’t even know their own costs of doing business.) Yet the people who owned the railroads made fabulous amounts of money (of which Stanford University is one symbol). The main way to do this was simple. The people who controlled a railroad (generally by putting up very little of their own money, thanks to the government subsidies) would also wholly own a construction company. They would cause the railroad to overpay the construction company to build the railroad—in effect transferring wealth from railroad stockholders and creditors into their own pockets
What did the Robber Barons invest in? In large part government, media & educational institutions so that they could help "educate" society on how to behave much more civilly than they have.
Corporate Advocacy
There are tons of marketing campaigns designed to "educate" society about the impacts of various companies. BP now markets the gulf coast economy they plundered.
"Get the facts" styled campaigns are rarely about promoting a complete worldview.
Remember the $500 million fine for Google from them pushing ads selling overseas Viagra in the US? Now they promote scaremongering ads against fakes from filthy labs.
Coca-cola runs The Beverage Institute & has "doctors" highlight how healthy soda is.
At the same time, when Pepsi was sued over an alleged rat being in a can of Mountain Dew. Pepsi's defense claimed: "the mouse would have dissolved in the soda had it been in the can from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff drank it" turning the mouse into a 'jelly-like' substance. But don't worry folks, it's healthy. :D
It is hard to know what is in our food & those who label things as organic have to fill out more paperwork than those who manufacture frankenfood. Then there are the baseline chemicals sold as biodegradable which are not. ;)
One of the largest religious institutions was found to be associated with illegally selling off hundreds of thousands of babies (after telling the single mother that their newborn child died). This process was going on through the late 1980's!
This past holiday season Best Buy not only sold products they didn't have, but in many cases when they did have them they charged a rate higher than the one advertised unless you caught it & forced them to charge you the advertised price.
When looking at my credit card bill I saw a scammy $22.99 charge on it for a credit report I have never ordered. I looked up information about the "company" offering that service & the #1 result (with sitelinks) was my darn credit card company's website! They had to conduct a block on themselves, but if you don't notice it they will steal $23 a month until you die. ;)
Is Our Financial System Transparent?
When one looks at the field of finance it is story after story of deception, nontransparency & lawlessness. It is a constant reminder that there is no such thing as business ethics.
Bank of New York Mellon ripped off their clients with unsavory Forex rates: "As investigators sought to determine whether the bank overcharged clients to execute their currency trades, a senior BNY Mellon executive nicknamed "Rambo" urged traders not to tell clients how much money they made on trading, according to the informant."
A former Federal Reserve member writes about the Fed: "No matter the legalistic interpretation, the Fed is, working through the ECB, bailing out European banks and, indirectly, spendthrift European governments. It is difficult to count the number of things wrong with this arrangement."
"What’s happened is that, almost overnight, we’ve switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it." - Christopher Peterson
The financial markets are becoming glorified crack houses: "Frankly, I am concerned that Wall Street is becoming little more than a glorified crack house. Day after day, the sole focus of Wall Street is on more sugar, stronger sugar, Big Bazookas of sugar, unlimited sugar, and anything that will get somebody to deliver the sugar faster. This is like offering a lollipop to quiet down a 2-year old throwing a tantrum, and expecting that the result will be fewer tantrums. What we have increasingly observed over the past decade is nothing but the gradual destruction of the ability of the financial markets to allocate capital for the benefit of future growth. By preventing the natural discipline of the markets to impose losses on poor stewards of capital, and to impose interest rates high enough to force debtors to allocate the capital usefully, the world's policy makers are increasingly wrecking the prospects for long-term economic growth."
Companies are often brought private, leveraged up on debt & have their pension programs destroyed to make "profits" for private equity investors: "Nowadays private-equity firms often spend hundreds of millions of their own money on an acquisition (BW -- Feb. 27). Just as often, though, they load up the companies with debt and use the money to pay themselves special dividends and other fees that allow them to profit even if the company itself struggles. Then the backers take the company public, often pocketing the lion's share of the offering."
Individuals who put in extra hours of work because they are sold on the promise of their options may also find thosedisappear: "Taking away the value of options that are vested means that the concept of vesting becomes bogus. It doesn't matter whether the employee understood if this was the deal or not, it's a scummy practice, and it's ultimately self-defeating (both for the company and the industry as a whole). Who would go to work for Skype (or any PE-backed company) in the future? "
Limitless fraud before the courts & dancing on the graves of the newly homeless: "Court records show that the firm angered state court judges for alleged false statements and filing suspect documents. Arthur Schack, a state court judge in Brooklyn, in a 2010 ruling said that pleadings by the Baum firm on behalf of HSBC Bank, a unit of London-based HSBC Holdings, in a foreclosure case were "so incredible, outrageous, ludicrous and disingenuous that they should have been authorized by the late Rod Serling, creator of the famous science-fiction television series, The Twilight Zone."
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The law firm said it would shut down after New York Times columnist Joe Nocera in November published photographs of a 2010 Baum firm Halloween party in which employees dressed up as homeless people. Another showed part of Baum's office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed houses."
That theft of physical property is ongoing: "Also announced over the weekend was the jaw-dropping, yet illuminating fact that the MF Global bankruptcy was fraudulently, nefariously and illegally drawn up as a Chapter 7 BK for a SECURITIES DEALER and NOT a commodity brokerage as it should have been. Look, MF Global was the second-largest non-bank FCM in the United States next to NewEdge which is the old FIMAT. If MF Global wasn’t an FCM, then there are no FCMs. Of course it was an FCM. It had $7.2 billion in customer seg funds as of August 31, 2011. And yet MF Global was immediately, from the get-go, put into Chapter 7 BK as a SECURITIES FIRM. This is fraud. MF Global’s BK should have OBVIOUSLY been established under Subchapter IV of the Chapter 7 code as a COMMODITY BROKERAGE."
And as banking criminals literally steal money, destroy lives & undermine the rule of law to grow their "profits" sleazeballs like Jamie Dimon think that the reason people hate them is envy.
The above makes no mention of helping Greece hide governmental debt, bid-rigging bribes in Jefferson County, robosigning bogus foreclosure documents, and a host of other crimes. But one thing in common with all the above crimes is this: no jailtime for the banksters.
Big banks represent the ultimate in concentrated economic power in today’s economies. They are able to resist all meaningful reform that could really change their compensation schemes. Their executives want to get all the upside while facing none of the true downside.
But capitalism without the prospect of failure is not any kind of market economy. We are running a large-scale, nontransparent, and dangerous government subsidy scheme for the benefit primarily of a very few, extremely wealthy people.
The actions of the financial cartel are both obvious & predictable. And the damage they do is felt worldwide:
Credit-financed economic booms, by turns in private then public credit as one ratchets up the other over a series of booms and busts, are as irresistible to politicians as hookers and maids.
...
The failures of American FIRE Economy policies are behind the movements in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, as reflation measures, from quantitative easing to currency depreciation, steal purchasing power from low income families world wide, acting as the most regressive tax imaginable. Simmering hatreds are exacerbated by the developing global crisis over oil supplies and costs.
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The so-called debate about debt ceilings, spending cuts, and entitlements reductions is a red herring. The public debt crisis arose from the 2007 - 2008 private credit market crisis, not the government liabilities that have been building for decades. The mistake of both the left and the right is thinking that we can escape an output gap without facing up to the politically unpopular task of demanding that creditors take a loss on loans taken out during the credit bubble era.
A creditor that makes bad loans deserves to go out of business. Their outsized compensation can't be justified unless they are also made to eat their losses. But rather than holding them accountable for their own actions, societies the world overabsorb that pain.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"- Benito Mussolini
Money is a human construct. The fact that our money is now backed by nothing more than our collective future ability to "produce" relegates us to that of slaves.
Money=paper=blood hours.
Blood hours are a finite measure. Heartbeats.
What's in your wallet? Is it the new debt slavery card: "A personal bankruptcy is supposed to cut borrowers loose from lenders and debt collectors, but Capital One Financial Corp.—one of the nation's largest credit-card issuers—sometimes doesn't want to let go."
After dropping his younger daughter at school, Octa walked into Citibank’s credit card collection department on the fifth floor of the Jamsostek tower just after 10 a.m. Four hours later, he left the 25-story building slumped motionless in a wheelchair -- a victim of what police allege was a violent assault by debt collectors. Driven to a nearby hospital in a Citibank car, Octa was pronounced dead on arrival.
Unfortunately, even if you stay out of debt, you are forced to support banking scams:
before being bailed out by governments, banks had never made any return in their history, assuming that their assets are properly marked to market. Nor should they produce any return in the long run, as their business model remains identical to what it was before, with only cosmetic modifications concerning trading risks.
So the facts are clear. But, as individual taxpayers, we are helpless, because we do not control outcomes, owing to the concerted efforts of lobbyists, or, worse, economic policymakers. Our subsidizing of bank managers and executives is completely involuntary.
The way the banks make money now is by hiding their losers off balance-sheet, or by forcing them on the taxpayers, and after having themselves declared "systemically important," adjusting their on balance-sheet exposures accordingly, crashing the system and cashing out on their leveraged derivative bets, also at the taxpayers' expense.
In real life, if there is such a thing anymore, all of the major banks are arguably insolvent. So, in reality, they're not making any money at all, they are merely having it transferred to them by their political operatives in Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank. This, after all, is the modern purpose of the Congress, and has always been the purpose of the Federal Reserve System.
government and banks are stuck together like a couple of dogs screwing and we don't know which is on top. Here, Republicans need government to finance war and Democrats need it to finance social programs. Both need it to finance both, as that is how government attempts to maintain power and influence over the people this day and time.
When Senate Democrats finally brokered a compromise over the proposed health-care law, a group of hedge funds were let in on the deal, learning details hours before a public announcement on Dec. 8, 2009.
The news was potentially worth millions of dollars to the investors, though none would publicly divulge how they used the information. They belong to a select group who pay for early, firsthand reports on Capitol Hill.
Since most money comes into circulation as debt (and due to the compounding nature of debt interest), if those at the top are not allowed to fail then those at the bottom will fall hard:
In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.
Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.
Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.
And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.
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Clearly any pretence that markets maintain themselves, that debts always have to be honored, went by the boards in 2008. That’s one of the reasons I think you see the beginnings of a reaction in a remarkably similar form to what we saw during the heyday of the ‘Third World debt crisis’ – what got called, rather weirdly, the ‘anti-globalization movement’. This movement called for genuine democracy and actually tried to practice forms of direct, horizontal democracy. In the face of this there was the insidious alliance between financial elites and global bureaucrats (whether the IMF, World Bank, WTO, now EU, or what-have-you).
Of course there are "opposition research" hacks willing to dig up dirt on anyone with wide reach who opposes the state-sponsored fraud: "It will be vital,” the memo says, “to understand who is funding it and what their backgrounds and motives are. If we can show that they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent it will undermine their credibility in a profound way.”
In 2004 the FBI warned that there was an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud and that it would create a crisis.
"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks," the president told them.
And, in spite of the FBI highlighting the massive mortgage fraud, and the above quote, the president (who is a horrible human being) aims to keep the population misinformed & ignorant, publicly stating that what Wall St did wasn't illegal!
this is how the much-lauded "freedom of the press" myth in the US actually works. If you perform the job of an actual journalist, telling truth to power, forget about attending press conferences at the White House, Pentagon or State Department. You won't even be admitted in the building.
The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people.
That is what they say, typically at the bottom of the posts, in blog posts that equate Google Chrome to being the Internet & spread misinformation about how Chrome is good for small business.
some of those sites are paid posts and have live links in them to Google Chrome without using nofollow & talk about SEO in the same post as well!
some of those posts link to the example businesses Google was paying to have covered
and all the posts are effectively "buying YouTube video views" for this video youtube.com/watch?v=QFLP7HD1s7k
You can say they didn't require the links, that the links were incidental, that leaving nofollow off was an accident, etc. ... but does Google presume the same level of innocence when torching webmasters? They certainly did not to the bloggers who reviewed K-Mart & the Google reconsideration request form states:
“In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.”
The Orwellian things about Google using the above strategy to market Chrome are:
Google has a clear pro-corporate big brand bias to their algorithms & layout (Vince & Panda updates + the part near the top of the SERPs for some searches that says "brands" as a filter type).
The more usage data Google collects the more stupid hoops it forces smaller businesses to jump through in order to compete, thereby further driving them under. (If small business owners didn't have enough time & resources for SEO, do they now also have time to get reviews, get local citations, deal with social stuff on Twitter + Facebook + Youtube + Google+ and a bit of SEO?)
Google polices how small businesses can even make income online. When K-Mart paid some small business bloggers to do sponsored posts Matt Cutts wrote a post (mattcutts.com/blog/sponsored-conversations/) about how he torched those small bloggers (while doing nothing to K-Mart) & equated that exercise to selling links that promote bogus brain cancer solutions. Yet Google Japan was already dinged for this sort of paid post activity & now Google is doing the same thing again.
The fact that Google is paying to spread that sort of misinformation about how their browser is helping small businesses is sort of like BP buying ads about doing tourism in the gulf. Only since Google destroying smaller businesses is something more abstract on virtual lands the PR propaganda campaign is much more effective, because (unlike oil washing ashore) people do not see what is not there. (The birds still die, but the black oil covered carcass isn't rotting on the beach).
Should you follow Google & buy ads on these sites? Are they christened & beyond reproach? I would sort of be afraid to buy exposure on the blogs where Google is buying coverage...if that latent public relations disaster eventually blows up in their face, they may assume others are as guilty as Google is & burn down the whole forest.
Google the dictator meet Google the marketer. You guys are going to get on well together!
Update: Danny highlighted how Google's Chrome ad buy created a lot of the low-quality filler pablum content that the Panda update was alleged to discourage.
Website Auditor is one of the 4 tools found in Link-Assistant's SEO Power Suite. Website Auditor is Link-Assistant's on-page optimization tool.
We recently reviewed 2 of their other tools, SEO Spyglass and Rank Tracker. You can check out the review of SEO Spyglass here and Rank Tracker here.
Update: Please note that in spite of us doing free non-affiliate reviews of their software, someone spammed the crap out of our blog promoting this company's tools, which is at best uninspiring.
What Does Website Auditor Do?
Website Auditor crawls your entire site (or any site you want to research) and gives you a variety of on-page SEO data points to help you analyze the site you are researching.
We are reviewing the Enterprise version here, some options may not be available if you are using the Professional version.
In order to give you a thorough overview of a tool we think it's best to look at all the options available. You can compare versions here.
Getting Started with Website Auditor
To get started, just enter the URL of the site you want to research:
I always like to enable the expert options so I can see everything available to me. Next step is to select the "page ranking factors:
Here, you have the ability to get the following data points from the tool on a per-page basis:
HTTP status codes
Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords
Total links on the page
Links on the page to external sites
Robots.Txt instructions
W3C validation errors
CSS validation errors
Any canonical URL's associated with the page
HTML Code Size
Links on the page with the no-follow attribute
Your next option is to select the crawl depth. For deep analysis you can certainly select no crawl limit and click the option to find unlinked to pages in the index.
If you want to go nuts with the crawl depth frequently, I'd suggest looking into a VPS to house the application so you can run it remotely. Deep, deep crawls can take quite awhile.
I know HostGator's VPS's as well as a Rackspace Cloud Server can be used with this and I'm sure most VPS hosting options will allow for this as well.
I'm just going to run 2 clicks deep here for demonstration purposes.
Next up is filtering options. Maybe you only want to crawl a certain section or sections of a site. For example, maybe I'm just interested in the auto insurance section of the Geico site for competitive research purposes.
Also, for E-commerce sites you may want to exclude certain parameters in the URL to avoid mucked up results (or any site for that matter). Though there is an option (see below) where you can have Website Auditor treat pages that are similar but might have odd parameters as the same page.
Another option I like to use is pulling up just the blog section of a site to look for popular posts link-wise and social media wise. Whatever you want to do in this respect, you do it here:
So here, I'm included all the normal file extensions and extension-less files to include in the report and I'm looking for all the stuff under their quote section (as I'm researching the insurance quote market).
The upfront filtering is one of my favorite features because I exclude unnecessary pages from the crawl and only get exactly what I'm looking for, quickly. Now, click next and the report starts:
Working With the Results
Another thing I like about Link-Assistant Products is the familiar interface between all 4 of their products. If you saw are other reviews, you are familiar with the results pane below.
Before that, Website Auditor will ask you about getting more factors. When I do the initial crawl I do not include stuff that will cause captchas or require proxies, like cache dates and PR. But here, you can update and add more factors if you wish:
Once you click that, you are brought to the settings page and give the option to add more factors, I've specifically highlighted the social ones:
I'll skip these for now and go back to the initial results section. This displays your initial results and I've also highlighted all the available options with colored arrows:
Your arrow legend is as follows:)
Orange - You can save the current project or all projects, start a new project, close the project, or open another project
Green - you can build an white-labeled Optimization report (with crawl, domain, link, and popularity metrics plugged in), Analyze a single page for on-page optimization, Update a workspace or selected pages or the entire project for selected factors, Rebuild the report with the same pages but different factors, or create an XML sitemap for selected webpages.
Yellow - Search for specific words inside the report (I use this for narrowing down to a topic)
Red - Create and update Workspaces to customize the results view
Purple - Flip between the results pane, the white-label report, or with specific webpages for metric updates
Workspaces for Customizing Results
The Workspaces tab allows you to edit current Workspaces (add/remove metrics) or create new ones that you can rename whatever you want and which will show up in the Workspaces drop-down:
Simply click on the Workspaces icon to get to the Workspaces preference option:
You can create new workspaces, edit or remove old ones, and also set specific filtering conditions relative to the metrics available to you:
Spending some time upfront playing around with the Workspace options can save you loads of time on the backend with respect to drilling down to either specific page types, specific metrics, or a combination of both.
Analyzing a Page
When you go to export a Website Auditor file (you can also just control/command + a to select everything in the results pane and copy/paste to a spreadsheet) you'll see 2 options:
Page Ranking Factors (the data in the results pane)
Page Content Data
You can analyze a page's content (or multiple pages at once) for on-page optimization factors relative to a keyword you select.
There are 2 ways you can do this. You can highlight a page in the Workspace, right click and select analyze page content. Or, you can click on the Webpages button above the filter box then click the Analyze button in the upper left. Here is the dialog box for the second option:
The items with the red X's next to them denote which pages can be analyzed (the pages just need to have content, often you see duplicates for /page and /page/)
So I want to see how the boat page looks, highlight it and click next to get to the area where you can enter your keywords:
Enter the keywords you want to evaluate the page against (I entered boat insurance and boat insurance quotes) then select what engine you want to evaluate the page against (this pulls competition data in from the selected engine).
The results pane here shows you a variety of options related to the keywords you entered and the page you selected:
You have the option to view the results by a single keyword (insurance) or multi-word keywords (boat insurance) or both. Usually I'm looking at multi-word keyphrases so that's what I typically select and the report tells you the percentage the keyword makes up of a specific on-page factor.
The on-page factors are:
Total page copy
Body
Title tag, meta description, and meta keywords
H1 and H2-H6 (H2-H6 are grouped)
Link anchor text
% in bold and in italics
Image text
Website Auditor takes all that to spit out a custom Score metric which is mean to illustrate what keyword is most prominent, on average, across the board.
You can create a white-label report off of this as well, in addition to being able to export the data the same way as the Page Factor data described above (CSV, HTML, XML, SQL, Cut and Paste).
Custom Settings and Reports
You have the option to set both global and per project preferences inside of Website Auditor.
Per Project Preferences:
Customer information for the reports
Search filters (extensions, words/characters in the URL, etc)
Customizing Workspace defaults for the Website reports and the Web page report
Setting up custom tags
Selecting default Page Ranking Factors
Setting up Domain factors (which appear on the report) like social metrics, traffic metrics from Compete and Alexa, age and ip, and factors similar to the Page Factors but for the domain)
XML publishing information
Your Global preferences cover all the application specific stuff like:
Proxy settings
Emulation settings and Captcha settings
Company information for reports
Preferred search engines and API keys
Scheduling
Publishing options (ftp, email, html, etc)
Website Auditor also offers detailed reporting options (all of which can be customized in the Preferences area of the application). You can get customized reports for both Page Factor metrics and Page Content Metrics.
I would like to see them improve the reporting access a bit. The reports look nice and are helpful but customizing the text, or inputting your own narratives is accessed via a somewhat arcane dialog blog, where it makes it hard to fix if you screw up the code.
Give Website Auditor a Try
There are other desktop on-page/crawling tools on the market and some of them are quite good. I like some of the features inside of Website Auditor (report outputting, custom crawl parameters, social aspects) enough to continue using it in 2012.
I've asked for clarification on this but I believe their Live Plan (which you get free for the first 6 months) must be renewed in order for the application to interact with a search engine.
I do hope they consider changing that. I understand that some features won't work once a search engine changes something, and that is worthy of a charge, but tasks like pulling a ranking report or executing a site crawl shouldn't be lumped in with that.
Nonetheless, I would still recommend the product as it's a good product and the support is solid but I think it's important to understand the pricing upfront. You can find pricing details here for both their product fees and their Live Plan fees.
Update: Please note that in spite of us doing free non-affiliate reviews of their software, someone spammed the crap out of our blog promoting this company's tools, which is at best uninspiring.
Key Features of SEO Spyglass
The core features of SEO Spyglass are:
Link Research
White Label Reporting
Historical Link Tracking
As with most software tools there are features you can and cannot access, or limits you'll hit, depending on the version you choose. You can see the comparison here.
Perhaps the biggest feature is their newest feature. They recently launched their own link database, a couple of months early in beta, as the tool had been largely dependent on the now dead Yahoo! Site Explorer.
The launch of a third or fourth-ish link database (Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, A-Href's rounding out the others) is a win for link researchers. It still needs a bit of work, as we'll discuss below, but hopefully they plan on taking the some of the better features of the other tools and incorporating them into their tool.
One of my pet peeves with software is feature bloat which in turn creates a rough user experience. Link-Assistant's tools are incredibly easy to use in my experience.
Once you fire up SEO Spyglass you can choose to research links from a competing website or links based off of a keyword.
Most of the time I use the competitor's URL when doing link research but SEO Spyglass doubles as a link prospecting tool as well, so here I'll pick a keyword I might want to target "Seo Training".
The next screen is where you'll choose the search engine that is most relevant to where you want to compete. They have support for a bunch of different countries and search engines and you can see the break down on their site.
So if you are competing in the US you can pull data the top ranking site off of the following engines (only one at a time):
Google
Google Blog Search
Google Groups
Google Images
Google Mobile
YouTube
Bing
Yahoo! (similar to Bing of course)
AOL
Alexa
Blekko
And some other smaller web properties
I'll select Google and the next screen is where you select the sources you want Spyglass to use for grabbing the links of the competing site it will find off of the preceding screen:
So SEO Spyglass will grab the top competitor from your chosen SERP will run multiple link sources off of that site (would love to see some API integration with Majestic and Open Site Explorer here).
This is where you'll see their own Backlink Explorer for the first time.
Next you can choose unlimited backlinks (Enterprise Edition only) or you can limit it by
Project or Search Engine. For the sake of speed I'm going to limit it to 100 links per search engine (that we selected in a previous screen) and exclude duplicates (links found in one engine and another) just to get the most accurate, usable data possible:
When you start pinging engines, specifically Google in this example, you routinely will get captcha's like this:
On this small project I entered about 8 of them and the project found 442 backlinks (here is what you'll see after the project is completed):
One way around captchas is to either pay someone to run this tool for you and manually do it, but for large projects that is not ideal as captcha's will pile up and you could get the IP temporarily banned.
Link-Assistant offers an Anti-Captcha plan to combat this issue, you can see the pricing here.
Given the size of the results pane it is hard to see everything but you are initially returned with:
an icon of what search engine the link was found in
the backlinking page
the backlinking domain
Spyglass will then ask you if you want to update the factors associated with these links.
Your options by default are:
domain age
domain ip
domain PR
Alexa Rank
Dmoz Listing
Yahoo! Directory Listing
On-page info (title, meta description, meta keywords)
Total links to the page
External links to other sites from the page
Page rank of the page itself
You can add more factors by clicking the Add More button. You're taken to the Spyglass Preferences pane where you can add more factors:
You can add a ton of social media stuff here including popularity on Facebook, Google +, Page-level Twitter mentions and so on.
You can also pick up bookmarking data and various cache dates. Keep in mind that the more you select, especially with stuff like cache date, you are likely to run into captcha's.
SEO Spyglass also offers Search Safety Settings (inside of the preferences pane, middle of the left column in the above screenshot) where you can update human emulation settings and proxies to both speed up the application and to help avoid search engine bans.
I've used Trusted Proxies with Link-Assistant and they have worked quite well.
You can't control the factors globally, you have to do it for each project but you can update Spyglass to only offer you specific backlink sources.
I'm going to deselect PageRank here to speed up the project (you can always update later or use other tools for PageRank scrapes).
Working With the Results
When the data comes back you can do number of things with it. You can:
Build a custom report
Rebuild it if you want to add link sources or backlink factors
Update the saved project later on
Analyze the links within the application
Update and add custom workspaces
These options are all available within the results screen (again, this application is incredibly easy to use):
I've blurred out the site information as I see little reason to highlight the site here. But you can see where the data has populated for the factors I selected.
In the upper left hand corner of the applications is where you can build the report, analyze the data from within the application, update the project, or rebuild it with new factors:
All the way to the right is where you can filter the data inside the application and create a
new workspace:
Your filtering options are seen to the left of the workspaces here. It's not full blown filtering and sorting but if you are looking for some quick information on specific link queries, it can be helpful.
Each item listed there is a Workspace. You can create your own or edit one of the existing ones. Whatever factors you include in the Workspace is what will show in the results pane as factors
So think of Workspaces as your filtering options. Your available metrics/columns are
Domain Name
Search Engine (where the link was found)
Last Found Date (for updates)
Status of Backlink (active, inactive, etc)
Country
Page Title
Links Back (does the link found by the search engine actually link to the site? This is a good way of identifying short term, spammy link bursts)
Anchor Text
Link Value (essentially based on the original PageRank formula)
Notes (notes you've left on the particular link). This is very limited and is essentially a single Excel-type row
Domain Age/IP/PR
Alexa Rank
Dmoz
Yahoo! Directory Listing
Total Links to page/domain
External links
Page-level PR
Most of the data is useful. I think the link value is overvalued a bit based on my experience finding links that often had 0 link value in the tool but clearly benefited the site it ended up linking to.
PageRank queries in bulk will cause lots of captcha's and given how out of date PR can be it isn't a metric I typically include on large reports.
Analyzing the Data
When you click on the Analyze tab in the upper left you can analyze in multiple ways:
All backlinks found for the project
Only backlinks you highlight inside the application
Only backlinks in the selected Workspace
The Analyze tab is a separate window overlaying the report:
You can't export from this window but if you just do a control/command-a you can copy and paste to a spreadsheet.
Your options here:
Keywords - keywords and ratios of specific keywords in the title and anchor text of backlinks
Anchor Text - anchor text distribution of links
Anchor URL - pages being linked to on the site and the percentages of link distribution (good for evaluating deep link distribution and pages targeted by the competing site as well as popular pages on the site...content ideas :) )
Webpage PR
Domain PR
Domains linking to the competing site and the percentage
TLD - percentage of links coming from .com, net, org, info, uk, and so on
IP address - links coming from IP's and the percentages
Country breakdown
Dmoz- backlinks that are in Dmoz and ones that are not
Yahoo! - same as Dmoz
Links Back - percentages of links found that actually link to the site in question
Updating and Rebuilding
Updating is pretty self-explanatory. Click the Update tab and select whether or not to update all the links, the selected links, or the Workspace specific links:
(It's the same dialog box as when you actually set up the project)
Rebuilding the report is similar to updating except updating doesn't allow you to change the specified search engine.
When you Rebuild the report you can select a new search engine. This is helpful when comparing what is ranking in Google versus Bing.
Click Rebuild and update the search engine plus add/remove backlink factors.
Reporting
There are 2 ways to get to the reporting data inside of Spyglass
There is a quick SEO Report Tab and the Custom Report Builder:
Much like the Workspaces in the prior example, there are reporting template options on the right side of the navigation:
It functions the same way as Workspaces do in terms of being able to completely customize the report and data. You can access your Company Profile (your company's information and logo), Publishing Profiles (delivery methods like email, FTP, and so on), as well as Report Templates in the settings option:
You can't edit the ones that are there now except for playing around with the code used to generate the report. It's kind of an arcane way to do reporting as you can really hose up the code (below the variables in red is all the HTML):
You can create your own template with the following reporting options:
Custom introduction
All the stats described earlier on this report as available backlink factors
Top 30 anchor URLs
Top 30 anchor texts
Top 30 links by "link value"
Top 30 domains by "link value"
Conclusion (where you can add your own text and images)
Overall the reporting options are solid and offer lots of data. It's a little more work to customize the reports but you do have lots of granular customization options and once they are set up you can save them as global preferences.
As with other software tools you can set up scheduled checks and report generation.
Researching a URL
The process for researching a URL is the same as described above, except you already know the URL rather than having SEO Spyglass find the top competing site for it.
You have the same deep reporting and data options as you do with a keyword search. It will be interesting to watch how their database grows because, for now, you can (with the Enterprise version) research an unlimited number of backlinks.
SEO Spyglass in Practice
Overall, I would recommend trying this tool out. If nothing else, it is another source of backlinks which pulls from other search engines as well (Google, Blekko, Bing, etc).
The reporting is good and you have a lot of options with respect to customizing specific link data parameters for your reports.
I would like to see more exclusionary options when researching a domain. Like the ability to filter redirects and sub-domain links. It doesn't do much good if we want a quick, competitive report but a quarter or more of the report is from something like a subdomain of the site you are researching.
SEO Spyglass's pricing is as follows:
Purchase a professional option or an enterprise option (comparison)
In running a couple of comparisons against Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO it was clear that Spyglass has a decent database but needs more filtering options (sub-domains mainly). It's not as robust as OSE or Majestic yet, but it's to be expected. I still found a variety of unique links from its database that I did not see on other tools across the board.
You can get a pretty big discount if you purchase their suite of tools as a bundle rather than individually
Buzzstream recently rolled out a beautiful UI update and I've been impressed with their offering for awhile now.
We like to review products which we ourselves use , as well as products that we feel are impressive. For me, Buzzstream fits both of those characteristics.
Buzzstream is a tool that I am fully adding to my toolset for 2012 and I think you should give it a shot as well.
What is Buzzstream?
Buzzstream has two products:
Buzzstream for Link Building
Buzzstream for Social Media
We will be focusing on the link building tool in this post. Buzzstream for Link Building focuses solely on link building functionality from soup (prospecting) to nuts (tracking, reporting, relationship management).
One of my favorite aspects of this tool is it's dedicated nature. It focuses on making link building more collaborative, more scalable, and more effective. It does all three quite well and reinforces the belief that sometimes a dedicated tool is the answer.
Why Buzzstream for Link Building?
Link building has come so far in recent years with respect to things like degree of difficulty, requirements of quality, as well as the need to track links and manage relationships.
Link building is such a key piece of an online marketing campaign (not just passing link juice but bringing in targeted, quality traffic and building up brand equity) to the point where I think having a robust tool for it makes a lot of sense; especially when you can use a tool like Buzzstream for it.
Here are some of the key features of Buzzstream that we'll be covering here:
Link Prospecting
Link Reporting and Tracking
Contact Management
IMAP Email Integration
Buzzmarker - Link Bookmarking Tool
Buzzstream Dashboard
The dashboard gives you a good, high-level overview of your account's history and tasks.
You can filter the history by:
Showing complete history (notes, emails, twitter, logged calls, blog comments)
One of the above mentioned history fields
Show for all projects or a specific project
All items for/from a user or for/from a specific user
The filtering capabilities are solid and make project spot checks very easy. For a quick export of your history, in .csv format just click on the folder to the left of the task area (in the right column).
Here is what the dashboard looks like:
To the right of the history pane is the task pane as well as recently viewed link prospects. The task pane also offers some good filtering capabilities:
I like the clean, visual look of the dashboard as well as the quick and helpful filtering capabilities. If you are running multiple campaigns with multiple members involved then I think you'll quickly appreciate the way Buzzstream has structured their dashboard.
Link Prospecting
To begin your link prospecting search, you can go to the Websites link and jump right in.
Then click on the Prospects icon to start your research. Here, you will need to set up a profile and up to 20 keywords and keyphrases for the search. I usually name the search after the main keyword I'm looking for, so in this case we'll rock SEO Tools and I'll throw in a couple more specific keywords for the search function.
In addition to prospecting you can specifically search the following countries:
USA
Canada
France
Germany
Ireland
Israel
Japan
Mexico
Netherlands
South Africa
Sweden
Spain
UK
You also have your choice between website results, news results, and blog results under the Search Type option.
Also, you can have this auto-run daily for new results (which is a great feature!) as well as have notifications sent to a specific person (you or a team member or contractor) when new results arrive.
If you no longer wish to receive results but want to save the search for later, just click the inactive button and reactivate when needed.
Another cool feature here is the blacklist feature. Dump in sites you wish to exclude from your searches on a per project or account-level basis. This is extremely helpful for streamlining new prospecting searches across your entire account. Block out competitors, your other properties, sites you know you'll never get a link from, etc).
Working With Link Prospects
When you open the profile again you are presented with the results.
The results come with default columns but you can click the Columns icon to play with tons and tons of additional, useful options
Click on that and get all these column options:
Buzzstream Data
Website
Assigned To
About
Most Recent Activity
Primary Contact
Job Title
Tags
Relationship Stage
RSS Feed
Links
Type
Dates
Date Added
Date Added To Project
Last Modified (any project)
Last Modified (this project)
Last Viewed (any project)
Last Viewed (this project)
Last Communication Date
Metrics
Followers (twitter)
Following (twitter)
Updates (twitter)
PageRank
Compete (UV/mo)
Inbound Links - SeoMoz
MozRank
Juice Passing Links
Domain Age
Overall Rating
Domain Authority
Address
Address Type
Address Line1
Address Line2
City
State
Zip
Country
Social Networks
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google Plus
Contact Info
Preferred Contact Method
Email
Phone
"Contact Us" URL
Suggested Profile Info
Prospecting Metrics (for keywords in your search)
Highest SERP Position
Average SERP Position
SERP Count - Top 10
SERP Count - Top 20
Buzzstream does a good job here of giving you control over so many different options. The other nice thing here is you can add a bunch of metrics or customize whatever you want, do a quick export, and set everything back to normal if you don't want or need all these metrics every time.
Here's a snippet of what the results look like with no filtering:
From here you can do all sorts of filtering with just about all of the options I outlined above. You can also click on a specific link and manage it at any point:
From here you can do just about anything:
Add a task, tag or note
Assign it to someone
Update the relationship stage
Rate the link
Put your own custom field in there
Copy or move it to another project (love this feature)
Remove it from the project
Check the WhoIS information
Approve it for the project
Add to your block list
Also, you can see the Twitter, FB, email, and phone icons next to each link. Buzzstream will pull those in when available. You can also add a site yourself but clicking the Add Site button where you can add as much or as little info as you have or want:
What I like to do is update the search with all the SEO related metrics and then filter (not looking for addresses or anything at this point, just SEO metrics).
Here are the filtering options:
The options pretty much cover everything you can add as a metric to their prospect results page. You can also create a specific filter and save it for future use (a big time saver for ongoing prospect research).
Once you are done filtering out the junk you can begin to work the prospect list by:
Assigning it to an employee or contractor or yourself :)
Updating the contact history by adding notes about contact history
Update the relationship stage
Once the link is secured you can simply add it to the tracking and reporting component by clicking on the link and selecting "approve".
There are so many filtering options and editing options, as mentioned above, that I really encourage you to get in there and play around with it. You can customize it to fit your specific link building needs (big or small) which is a really nice feature to have (a tool that can scale up or down with you and your business).
Link Reporting and Tracking
I went ahead and approved the link-assistant.com domain as being a link I recently secured. To work with approved links you just need to move on over to the Links tab:
Again, you have a ton of filtering options here:
Buzzstream, via the Column tab, gives you lots of helpful data on a per link basis to help with overall link management and reporting:
You can also import all your links by clicking the import tab (Buzzstream gives you a template to use for this right from the import dialog box)
From here the next logical step is to set up link tracking to automatically notify you of any changes to links you are tracking.
Link Tracking
Buzzstream offers automated and manual link tracking. Buzzstream will let you track the following link data types via their automated backlink checker (this runs every 2 weeks) and manual link checker:
Newly verified links
Links that have changed (anchor text, no-follow, and so on)
Links that have been removed
Previous linking pages that are 404's
Cache Date
You can select who receives this report, and the manual report via email. Manual reports can be completed by going to the links tab and clicking on the Run Backlink Checker Icon:
The report is then delivered to the specified email address (can be changed in project settings) in short order (longer for bigger checks of course).
I would recommend targeting the more important links here. There is a lot of churn on the web and link tracking tools, that are cloud based, do have tracking limits (Buzzstream comes in at 500 links for the basic plan, 25,000 for their Plus, and 100,000 for their Premium Plan). They also have a solo plan for 1 user and up to 1,500 tracked links.
They offer custom plans as well.
Link Reporting
The link reporting is good and is one area where I think they can use some improvement (ability to spit out anchor text distribution reports, upload logos,
automated report emailing, etc).
To generate a report you click on the pie (mmmmm pie) icon on the Links page:
Once you click there you get 2 options:
Link Report - reporting on link opportunities and completed links
Spend Report - reporting on the cost of links that cost money
Here is the dialog box for the Links Report:
Export options are PDF, HTML, and XML for Word and Excel.
The Spend Report is clean and simple to read, here is the dialog box for that:
The reports are quick to generate and clean. I think if they add some more customization options it will be a homerun; it's still better than most reporting options out there.
Keeping Up with Contacts
You can store, add, and access key contacts and their contact information within the People tab
As with their other options there is a wide variety of filtering and column customization capability to help you slice, dice, and keep track of key contacts within a specific project (or through an entire account).
You can add in pertinent contact info like their name, numbers, associated websites, social network information, and so on. You can also keep a history of calls, notes, and emails (more on emails in a minute) right inside the contact's information center:
IMAP Email Integration for Conversation Tracking
This is one of my favorite features. You can configure Buzzstream to automatically populate contact history on your link outreach campaigns:
If you are managing a team, or just your own link campaign really, this is a great feature to have. In addition to the other contact management features I mentioned above, this feature adds another layer of helpful contact management. Having CRM functionality inside of a link building tool is quite helpful when we talk about things like scaling link building campaigns and managing teams
When you add your email account you can also send email from Buzzstream. You can select any number of "People" or contacts that you want and work through them one by one by creating an email template (see below) and quickly customizing it to the specific person you are targeting
Using canned responses in Gmail is similar but the difference here is the integration with Buzzstream and the ease of going right through a selected list of contacts (and having it saved in their contact history automatically).
Lots of people use BuzzStream as a database of all their prospects/partners and then slice and dice them for campaigns. So, for example, suppose you are trying to secure guest posts. You go to All Contacts (contacts for your whole account, not just one project) and select everything tagged "finance" that's a "guest post" type and that's linked to you in the past.
After that, you take those contacts of known finance guest post opportunities, copy them to a new project and then work that list. You cover a lot of this in your filter descriptions. Essentially, use the tagging and filtering system to build your own database for rinse and repeat solutions.
You can also track Twitter stuff (which can get out of hand quickly in terms of back and forth contact, real time) and works the same way as Buzzstream's IMAP integration.
For the Twitter tracking you can basically import a bunch of twitter lists into BuzzStream, start retweeting their content and then filter to find everyone you've retweeted three days ago (filter by: Communication History=tweet, contact modified=3 days ago).
Save this filter and you have a list of people to follow up with on a regular basis. You can then send a template-based email that refers to the retweet and use that as a quick in to perhaps securing a link opportunity.
The Buzzmarker
Buzzstreams' Buzzmarker gives you the ability to save a prospect's information from any browser. To set up the Buzzmarker you just go into your settings and drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar :D
Here is a snippet of the Buzzmarker dialog box:
Anytime you come across news stories, blog posts, and Twitter feeds that you want to store for future work inside of Buzzstream all you do is click on the Buzzmarker
The Buzzmarker pulls in lots of information and gives you options to do a variety of things like:
Add a task for the clipping
The ability to gather and note link information like acquistion method and link type, also checks to see if the site is linking to you already
Add contact info and social media profiles
Links through to contact info search in Google, Pipl, as well as Twitter and Linkedin Profile search via Google, Twellow, and Linkedin
Give Buzzstream a Shot
If you are looking for a strong link building tool which incorporates any of the features below, you should give Buzzstream a try:
Built in Link Prospecting
CRM Functionality
Scalability
Ease of Use
Permission and Access Control for Teams
Link Tracking and Reporting
Buzzstream is a quality link building and link management tool that is certainly worth trying out if you are engaged in link building activity. The reporting is stronger than most other options out there but I think they can do even better with it after seeing what they've done on the inside. If you do try them out let us know what you think in the comments!
Take it for spin, they have free trials available over at Buzzstream.Com.
For many years it was true that SEO = links, but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals.
Some of Google's new search results look quite alarming in terms of every single link above the fold is either a paid ad, or links to yet another Google page wrapped in ads.
I have a huge monitor & it is impossible for me to click *anywhere* above the fold on some search results without going through Google's toll booth or clicking off to yet another Google ad wrapped page.
(click on the image for the full sized view)
Some people have given Google the benefit of the doubt "well this is just vertical search" and "this is just for the consumer" but we see that in many cases it harms consumers by limiting choice:
Charlie Leocha, the director of the Consumer Travel Alliance, says Google Flight Search is “limiting consumers’ knowledge.” He explains, “this is a situation where Google is trusted as a ‘search engine’ that goes across the whole Web, but it is only going to a small select group of airlines and including them in Flight Search.”
The bottom line?
According to Leocha, “Google and the airlines have a sweetheart deal with each other, and the consumers are getting screwed.”
Those who coddled Google & gave Google the benefit of the doubt now have egg on their face, and the industry as a whole is poorer for their poor judgement & lack of stewardship.
As absurd as the above behavior is, it gets worse. When Google acquired DoubleClick, Larry Page wanted to keep Performics (an SEO/SEM company). But since it would have been a flagrant violation of law for him to run an SEO company, they now decide that nobody should run an SEO company...telling consumers to simply forget about SEO even when they specifically search out information about SEO!
Google recently ran AdWords ads with the following copy when consumers searched Google for SEO information:
You can't be 100% certain which is which until long AFTER you click. And by then Google's cash register has already rang & it is off to dupe the next person.
Comments turned off, as this is a conversation that NEEDS TO SPREAD. If you run a blog about SEO, you owe it to your readers & your industry to cover this topic. If this topic doesn't get broad coverage then pretty soon your career might be over & you will deserve it too.
At the same time, independent webmasters face greater uncertainty than ever (legal, personal property rights, and from alleged "quality" algorithms like Panda & editorial crackdowns from Google engineers).
If you are not operating at scale, you are an inefficiency which must be expunged from the marketplace.
Such a view may have been seen as cynical, but it is something that more people are realizing as true. Read this great article from Tom Foremski on ZDNet.
Google's percent of downstream traffic to YouTube has more than doubled since Panda.
You know how John Stewart or George Carlin have to present reality as a joke to express it? Well watch the above video & then read this article:
“Every single leading company is waiting for user-generated content or is licensing content” in order to reach advertisers, Rosenblatt said. “YouTube was tired of waiting. They told us that they needed a home and garden channel, a pets channel and a health/Livestrong channel. They are paying us up front, plus a rev share. This is the beginning of them funding professional content creators.”
