agouyet

M Posted 15 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

By now, I’m sure most of you know all too well the story David Segal of The New York Times had to share with us: On early morning Wednesday February 9^th J.C. Penney was the King of the hill when it came to search engine ranking results. They were #1 for multiple keywords such as “living room furniture”, “Samsonite carry on luggage”, “bedding”, and “dresses” outing competitors such as Macy’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Wal-Mart, and even Brand owners such as Samsonite themselves. By later that night, J.C. Penney’s rankings had plummeted; they were buried to the 5^th, 6^th and even 7^th pages of Google. On the following Saturday, The New York Times Published an article titled “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” detailing how J.C. Penny put itself in this situation. 

The internet community was roaring. Twitter tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, and news articles began to report how Google decided to crack down on Black Hat SEO Tactics. Companies started to panic in the wildfire that ensued; corporate executives made phone calls trying to figure out how to make sure what happened to J.C. Penney didn’t happen to them. In the midst of this pandemonium, one of our clients called us and asked if we could help. 

They wanted a detailed backlink report of their site to ensure that they were not at risk of facing Google’s Wrath. The BrightEdge platform already had the capability to display detailed reports on backlinks. We quickly restructured that capability to audit a company’s entire backlink footprint, looking for indicators of link hubs, link farms and paid links. 

And so BrandSafe was born and open to the SEO community as “a new, free analysis and alert product that can expose disreputable SEO techniques to CMOs before they end up in the headlines.” We decided to offer this as a free service not just our own customers, but non-customers as well. We felt that this was the right way to promote White Hate SEO tactics. We knew that offering this service would indirectly make search a much more pleasant and enjoyable experience for both organizations and users because this is the heart of White Hat SEO. Within a couple of weeks, we were able to conduct and analyze reports for more than 1000 BrandSafe link audit requests. The results weren’t pretty as we discovered that approximately 25% of the companies we audited had Illegitimate “Black Hat” backlinks. The bad news is that most senior management is unaware that their company is engaging in such risky tactics. If these sites are caught, they risk serious punishment by Google and a detrimental blow in possible revenue. At BrightEdge, we focus on innovation and contributing to the SEO community. We strive on helping marketers rise above the increasing clutter of the web and drive organic revenue from search engines across the globe in a measurable, predictable way.

brightedge

M Posted 15 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

The New York Times published a front-page article in its Business section that is getting the attention of every marketing executive and SEO manager. “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” was the result of a three-month investigation into a paid links scheme that elevated J.C. Penney to the top of the search rankings in nearly every category in which it competes. The problem, of course, is that Google clearly spells out that such paid links are “in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.” After the Times brought J.C. Penney’s ‘Black Hat’ techniques to Google’s attention, its engineers took corrective action. Within hours, the retailer had fallen from the top ranks on Google to positions down on the sixth or seventh page. J.C. Penney’s traffic and revenue from organic search will undoubtedly take a huge hit in the months to come. As much as this is a cautionary tale, this story also shows the importance of focusing your teams and consultants on ‘White Hat’ SEO that don’t violate search engine guidelines. BrightEdge’s SEO platform features an exclusive recommendations system that helps our customers discover link hubs that are 100% Google-approved. Contact us if you would like to learn more about this unique capability.

brightedge

M Posted 15 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

When a number of articles appeared on leading tech blogs over the last few weeks criticizing prevalent ‘Google Spam,’ it was inevitable that Google would respond quickly and forcefully. Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, wrote last week on Googleblog that his team was targeting ‘content farms’ and later acknowledged an algorithm change on his personal blog directed against spam results from duplicate content scrapers. This is consistent with Google’s webmaster guidelines: relevant original content, well-optimized, no tricks. At BrightEdge, we are comforted in that all our customers are focusing on 100% "Google approved" White Hat SEO for their sites. Take for example what FolioDynamix said upon selecting BrightEdge as its SEO platform:

Other vendors tried to sell us on their paid link services, which surprised us since that practice can get our site penalized by search engines. BrightEdge was the obvious choice as an invaluable, trusted platform.

Since 2003, Google has consistently and explicitly stated that paid links violate their guidelines. We can’t say this firmly enough: Paid links and Black Hat SEO will be toxic to your search ranking - and potentially to your business. If you are not absolutely certain that your site is ‘White Hat,’ you should urgently review your site policies – including those of your agencies and consultants. How do you keep tabs on your SEO team’s techniques and keep them within Google’s guidelines? Let us know in the comments below. Update Matt Cutts tweeted that Bruce Clay's post last week on the urgent need for webmasters to drop paid links is "a good summary." As Clay wrote, “For the benefit of everyone, I am turning the volume knob on this warning all of the way to 11. And, no, I am not crying wolf." That's as close to a clear warning from Google as a webmaster could ever hope to get.

agouyet

M Posted 15 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

On the heels of our selection to the OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies, we have even more exciting news to share today. For the last three years, BrightEdge focused on innovation. We were the first enterprise SEO platform to make SEO as easy as PPC, the first to tie SEO to ROI and the first to integrate with Web Analytics. Today we become the first SEO platform to take SEO global. For the first time, marketers for global companies can leverage a single technology platform that cuts through the clutter of the web, finds new opportunities to drive revenue and traffic, and makes a truly measurable, actionable contribution from SEO to their marketing mix. BrightEdge’s unique capabilities and innovations are now available on a global scale, not just inside the US. Marketers now have a single cloud-based platform to manage SEO and drive ROI from organic search traffic across the world. No other SEO platform can match this functionality. Here are some of the key benefits that our users will see:

The only global reporting suite for SEO: One of our key innovations is the ability to provide instant, always-updated SEO reports and dashboards that are used from the CMO down to the SEO manager. We extended these dashboards so that everyone across global companies can now immediately understand the ROI of their SEO efforts in their country or countries. The CMO can get an aggregated global view for all countries to allow fine-tuning of their SEO budget allocation by region.

100% data integrity for the whole world: Our customers rely on us to give them the most accurate data about SEO ROI - data that they can defend inside their company when they are justifying their work or asking for funding. So we took our same capabilities that made us the de-facto leader for SEO data quality, integrity, accuracy in the US and deployed them internationally.

All of our data is captured “in country” so that it is tied to what searchers see locally on that country’s search engines. For example, if we are reporting on Google in the UK, we call the search engine from inside the UK, not from the US. By contrast, SEO tools that call search engines from your own computer or a fixed US location will give a distorted view of the results.

Enabling of global alignment on common goals and strategies: Overlap and miscommunication can plague international SEO teams. One common issue for SEO managers, for example, is having multiple pages that compete on the same keyword and unintentionally steal “SEO authority” from each other. This problem happens often in just a single country, so imagine how hard it is to manage across multiple countries and teams!

We are also pleased to announce that Ming Lei, the Chief Architect and one of the four founders of Baidu, has joined our advisory board. He will provide guidance on optimizing our platform as we move forward into more international markets and bring more search engines into our system. We are really proud to be the SEO partner to the largest brands in the world. With our extended platform, it’s never been simpler for international teams to execute on SEO, break through clutter, and efficiently, pro-actively build new high-value opportunities that drive ROI in ways that have never been available to them before.

• TechCrunch: BrightEdge Takes SEO Platform Global, Adds Baidu Chief Architect Ming Lei As Advisor
• Adotas: BrightEdge Flips Global Switch For SEO Platform
• Mediapost: Former Baidu Chief Architect Helps BrightEdge Take SEO International
• Xconomy: BrightEdge Going Global

agouyet

M Posted 15 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

There has been a ton of noise in the last few weeks in search industry outlets, tech blogs and mainstream media about ‘Search Engine Spam’ harming Google’s credibility as a pure search engine and its results becoming a so-called ‘marketing jungle.’ While there’s no question that the sophistication of web spammers has created new challenges, we don’t see some sort of ending for traditional search. On the contrary, if you look at all the changes that Google has rolled out recently, it is clear that its search engine is still innovating and aggressively cracking down on spamming techniques like paid links, cloaking, and auto-content generation. At BrightEdge, we’re committed to growing our SEO platform alongside search engines’ priorities to assure that SEO practitioners always have access to the best, most actionable data to improve SEO in a 100% Google-friendly way white hat. This week our CEO Jim Yu had the opportunity to comment on these issues over at Adotas. You can check out the full story here and or look below for highlights from the interview.

How could Google better approach the plethora of spam and lackluster content gumming up the web (i.e., cut through the crap)? One of the most interesting ways the internet is fundamentally shifting is that the signals that search engines relied on to evaluate content have totally changed. It used to be that people would link to your content if they thought it was interesting. At a simplified level, this was one of Google’s greatest innovations: to use reference as a barometer for relevance. But now, more than a decade later, there is a world of ways to game this system. Paid links, cloaking and auto-content generation have become more common, sophisticated and difficult to detect. Another example of how things have changed is in using age as a signal. It used to be that older content that had lots of links was a sign of relevance. Now with real-time social, it can be – but not consistently - be the opposite. So search engines are posed with the problem of blending in recency and popularity and balancing them in the greater framework. So if you’re Google, how do you make sense of and blend in all these new signals and practices as the old ones decline? It’s still early days in figuring out how traditional search blends with social search, but clearly these factors are going to bring a lot of innovation. How have SEO practitioners had to adjust in facing this same foe (i.e., crap content and spam)? What the advent of search engine spam really shows is that SEO is crucial to business goals and needs to be managed, funded and evaluated in a systematic way – just like any other element of a company’s marketing mix. Search engines are an exploitable opportunity for spammers today because there is a huge disparity in SEO expertise. Really what we’re seeing is a race between companies whose core competencies are selling things versus companies whose core competency is doing SEO to siphon off users. For many of the former, SEO has not traditionally been elevated in their marketing mix in a sophisticated, well-funded way. It’s been a nice-to-have back office function, but not a source of competitive advantage. How can search advertisers take advantage of social searching services? Lines between web, search and social search are blurring. You’re already getting social search results blended into the regular search results. This will continue to converge over time and bring new challenges and opportunities for marketers. Take reputation management, for example. From a search perspective, you want to see what listings are coming up for your brand. But now you need to look beyond search results and see what people are saying on Twitter, Facebook and myriad other sites – and that becomes an integrated part of your online strategy. No longer will you measure share of search. You’ll have to measure your share across all these channels.

agouyet

M Posted 15 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

It is no secret that Google has figured out how to identify paid links networks - it takes us a couple of hours to identify such a network (including the so-called "high-quality" paid link networks) so I imagine Google does it in a few minutes.  Reducing each link value to zero must then be trivial.  So if you are using paid links, you are left with no upside and plenty of downside if your site ends up in the Google penalty box.   Could there possibly still be value here? It seems the answer is yes.  Imagine our surprise to discover someone - we can only suspect it must be a competitor - figured out a creative way to still extract value from paid links.

Take for example https://www.skymondo.com/choosing-the-best-seo-tools.  This page looks legitimate and happens to link to www.brightedge.com. But if you take a look at the site, it is obvious most of it is irrelevant content designed to trick a search engine. I can assure you nobody at BrightEdge had anything to do with this.  We can only assume the next step for whoever is behind this is to report BrightEdge to Google in the hope that we get penalized for an action that we did not take. For us as a 100% white hat SEO company focused on helping enterprises create a discipline for SEO and elevate the practice of SEO, this represents a new low in the usage of black hat techniques. It's disappointing to see black hat link experts continue to focus efforts and energy on developing new, low handed tactics. What are your thoughts on this topic? We would love to get your feedback.

brightedge

M Posted 16 years ago

t 9 min read

We asked Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz's CEO, to give us his views on backlinking strategies and how to identify white hat versus black hat backlinks. Here is Rand's commentary on this subject.

Separating black hat from white hat link building is no easy task. It's generally the case that links that require payment are in the black hat territory, yet buying a listing with the Better Business Bureau or joining a local Chamber of Commerce that requires a membership fee can get you a great, white hat link, yet have a direct payment associated with it.The best method we've found to think about black vs. white hat links is to consider the intent.

 

If you're acquiring a link through any method (buying, asking, cajoling, trading, etc.) with the primary intent of manipulating the search engine rankings, you're likely in a danger zone. If, instead, you're either producing content that will naturally attract links or marketing your site to those who have a natural interest in sharing/spreading your works, you're in the clear.  

 

Some forms of link acquisition will always be black hat - hacking, UGC-spamming (blog comments, forums, guestbooks, Q+A sites, etc.), most forms of paid linking and text link advertising, link farms and many forms of reciprocal linking. These are nearly always intended to manipulate search results, rather than add a valuable node to the web's link graph that real human users will find useful and valuable.

Great white hat link methodologies are nearly infinite (limited only by your marketing creativity), but include natural link acquisition through content, social media links from people/sites referencing your material, content syndication, producing badges/widgets/embeddable content, promoting link-worthy content to link-likely audiences such as bloggers, speaking at conferences and events where a profile link is included, publishing papers/books/guides on sites that offer links back, investing in research that others cite in their own publications and many, many more.

At SEOmoz, we universally recommend white hat link building over black hat, not for moral or ethical reasons, but because, practically speaking, white hat links continue to add value forever, while black hat links may not work, even the day they're created. The high risks and limited life expectancy of the rewards mean that for virtually every web business, save those that have a "churn-and-burn," temporary ranking goal, black hat link building simply doesn't make sense.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz

  Check out our recent posts on 10 link building ideas you can do in a day and on effectively using backlinks for SEO success.

Jim

M Posted 16 years ago

t 9 min read

We are thrilled to announce our partnership with SEOMoz - bringing the power of Linkscape's index to enterprise marketers by showing them how to easily get backlinks.  Through BrightEdge Connect and the SEOMoz partnership, we are bringing Linkscape's 450 billion links directly into our Enterprise SEO Platform.  With BrightEdge becoming the SEO system of record for enterprises, it was important to provide this information directly inside BrightEdge so that everyone from the CMO to the SEO manager are operating from the same information and metrics, including backlinks which are a key signal used by the search engines. Legitimate Backlink Strategies That Work We are continuing to lead the enterprise SEO market with this new offering and are taking another step in simplifying how marketers manage SEO.  This integration gives marketers at Fortune 1000 and Internet Retail 500:

• Competitive Link Intelligence - Key information on how their competitors are using backlink to beat them in natural search is available directly in the BrightEdge platform.
• ROI of Link Campaigns - Visibility into the ROI of SEO  helps marketers invest more into the backlink strategies that work and stop investing in the ones that don't.
• Automated Recommendations - Specific and automated link building recommendations for each targeted keyword and page enable enterprises to execute a scalable SEO strategy that drives organic revenue.

We are very excited to partner with SEOMoz because of our shared values on openness and transparency, and the shared belief that white-hat link building is the best strategy for long-term SEO success.

agouyet

M Posted 16 years ago

t 9 min read

We are very excited to announce BrightEdge Connect.  In a nutshell, we are connecting the world of SEO to the universe of marketing with a new integration capability in our SEO platform.  This will - for the first time - bring SEO into the CMO suite.  It is already in production and is integrated with Webtrends, Omniture and other web analytics vendors.

Challenge: SEO is disconnected from CMO Suite. The problem in SEO today is that natural search is disconnected from other marketing channels.  And the reason for this is simple.  Web analytics are not integrated with SEO.  If you think about it, paid search has a nice API that anyone can call to get information about a campaign but there is no equivalent for organic search.  If you want to find out what happened in SEO, you need a technology stack that - among many other things - can crawl the web at scale and connect it back into Web analytics. Because of this disconnect, we find CMOs don't fully understand SEO and as a result they typically underfund SEO - even though the evidence shows that SEO is one of the most profitable channels.

Solution: BrightEdge Connect - An Open Integration Layer. When we first launched BrightEdge, we talked about how after three years of development we were announcing the first platform that would allow marketers to manage SEO as easily as paid search.  We are very excited to now announce the next major step in turning SEO into a first class marketing channel. BrightEdge Connect is a new integration technology in our SEO platform that provides complete access into the BrightEdge SEO platform and also connectors that bring data into the platform.   The open bi-directional integration technology has many applications that we will talk about over time but our customers told us loud and clear that the most important priority was to integrate with Web Analytics, so that they can connect SEO with the rest of their marketing universe.

BrightEdge Connect Brings SEO to the CMO Suite. With BrightEdge Connect, we are bringing the whole universe of SEO into the CMO’s suite to finally connect the dots across all marketing channels.  For the first time, companies can create complete marketing dashboards that combine SEO with the metrics they use to measure and run their business. CMOs can now get a dashboard with a full view across all marketing programs, including SEO.  And the benefit is quite simple: it allows marketers to finally make the most out of all these opportunities without forgetting SEO, which may very well be the most important channel.

agouyet

M Posted 16 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

We are proud to formally launch the BrightEdge SEO platform! This is a great accomplishment and congratulations to everyone who made this possible. Read the full announcement here. What is different about BrightEdge? First, we are designed for the enterprises who wants to scale their organic channel in a measurable and predictable way. We provide the platform to support that growth around common goals, metrics, and recommendations that are instantly available to everyone involved in SEO. We are not a point solution but an integrated suite for SEO. Second, we have developed a number of innovative and completely unique capabilities:

• Closed loop analytics that pinpoint the SEO changes that increase revenue. This is critical for understanding the business impact of any SEO project and spending time and resources accurately on SEO.
• Competitive intelligence that tells you exactly what is working for your competitors and how to beat them in natural search. Another unique capability that removes guesswork when you are developing your SEO roadmap.
• Actionable recommendations on how to best target SEO opportunities that are ready to be exploited. These recommendations are not the typical "one size fits all" recommendations but tailored to the various people involved in SEO across a company.
• Scalability to accommodate any number of pages, keywords, or backlinks, enabling you to grow your SEO footprint over time without any constraints.

In the upcoming weeks, we will be talking in more details about our solution. In the meantime, please check out selected customer testimonials on our web site including MySpace, Symantec, VMware, Trulia, and Branders. Are you ready to turn your SEO into a ROI-driven marketing channel? Stay tuned. Best The BrightEdge Team