You must login or register!
Inbound.org uses Twitter to register and create accounts. Your Twitter handle will also be your username here on Inbound and registration/login will enable you to submit content, post comments and create/edit your Inbound profile. Use the button below to verify your Twitter account.
Login or Register
That Mike was ever implicated in this at all is the stupid part.
Right. The blogger implicated him to make the story more sensational and to drive the social shares, but it was all at the risk of his (the blogger) own reputation. So yeah, stupid.
I like Mike. But no, it's not stupid he was implicated. iAcquire has purchased links as part of the SEO process. The SEO process would fall under inbound marketing. Mike's the director of inbound marketing. It makes complete sense that he should have known this was happening. He's new to the company, true, but two months is still a fairly long time. He either had no idea what was going on (not good in various ways), was kept out of the loop of what was going on (not good in various ways) or knew what was going on but hadn't spoken publicly about it (good perhaps if you're working to make changes in a company, but odd when you've just published a guide warning others against black hat tactics). The blogger that I've seen so many people want to attack didn't go out and try to actively discover all this. He was sent a link solicitation (three times in a row) from a company that probably is connected to iAcquire, even though iAcquire still won't admit that, at this point. His story was sensational, to me, only to the degree that as he looked at that request more, it appeared to be leading back to both a major company and an SEO firm where with a link building guide warning against using black hat tactics. IE: the blogger didn't make the story sensational. The facts did.
The blogger didn't provide evidence to make any connection between Mike and iAcquire's alleged paid link schemes. This is what I felt made the post sensational. Applying some basic critical thinking to the situation would lead to the conclusion that Mike was hired to clean up iAcquire's practices because Mike has no verifiable track record of being involved with paid link schemes. As far as most of us know, Mike's got a stellar track record in terms of practicing what he preaches. I felt the blogger used his name to sensationalize the story. Danny, you're one of the most respected and looked-up-to people in the game. If bloggers feel that you think these types of posts add value I guess we'll see more of them in the future. But my guess is that only the agencies with the high-profile, name brand SEOs will be worth 30 hours of investigation because they're the only ones that will get links and PR on the most read industry blogs.
I'm impartial to Mike; I think he contributes a great deal to the industry. Are we personal friends? Well, frankly, no. He doesn't know I exist; I'm quite okay with that. But I think it's foolhardy to do SO much journalistic justice to the outing of the company (he definitely had to DIG) and to then try and pin it on Mike. Not hard to find out he was hired 2 months prior with some digging. At very least the blogger could have presented it with a more quizzical tone instead of acting like it was so incredibly damning. I hear what you're saying Danny, and perhaps "Stupid" was the wrong choice of word. I wasn't trying to attack the blogger himself. But when you play with reputations, you ought to play very carefully.
David, he didn't blame Mike for the paid links. If he's going to be attacked, attack him for what he wrote. What he wrote was that he got a weird link request, three times in a row. He provided some pretty ample evidence that the company it came from was linked to iAcquire. He said that iAcquire's forward facing statements seems to suggest that buying links were bad. He cited Mike post at SEOmoz as one of these. Mike's name wasn't in the headline, wasn't even in a subhead, nor is he the only person from iAcquire cited or mentioned in that story. I don't read anything in that story about Josh trying to "pin" this all on Mike, as Joel also says. As for him somehow supposedly not using critical thinking skills, well, there's also a strong argument that if you want to make your company seem white hat -- and it's not -- then you hire someone with a white hat reputation. So which is it, if we're going to figure out all the various conspiracies that can be tossed out there? Me, I'm trying to stick with the facts. And what I was saying in my original comment is that it wasn't stupid that Mike got implicated in all this. But again, if you actually read the story, even Josh doesn't "implicate" Mike. He's implicating iAcquire itself.
@David - I think it was really unfortunate that Mike made the tweet that he did, saying that Google was "throwing a hissy fit" because there was "no link network to ban". To me, this sounds like he is defending iAcquire, and doesn't sound like a very white hat position to be speaking (or tweeting) from. From what I've been told, iAcquire PR immediately stopped him from tweeting about it further and thats why we got the blog post written by their PR people, and not by Mike, which as an "expert inbound marketer" who we're all looking at going "Dude, WTF?" that blog really should have come from him. That said, I still blame Joe Griffin, iAcquire CEO, for I believe misleading Mike King into taking the job to help them stop doing Black Hat stuff, when in fact he only wanted the guy for his name. Griffin paid millions to buy Conductors Link Buying operation, you think he just wants to shut that down after so recently making that investment? Not likely. Like always, follow the money.
Oh come on Danny, 2 months isn't a long time in a new job. To completely change the mindset and strategy in that time is impossible, even if you wanted, and had the power to. I don't like the use of the phrase "financial compensation" in the article, it's buying links, just say it.
I didn't say two months was enough time to make changes. I said that it wasn't stupid that Mike was implicated in all this, as Joel put out there. It wasn't stupid. It made complete sense, for the reasons I explained. If you knew nothing about Mike, you get a paid link request leading back to his company, you see that he's the head of inbound marketing (which should include SEO), it's a sensible question to ask. Was he involved with this? Sensible, logical, downright obvious to wonder. That's different from saying he was responsible for it, or blaming him for it or saying he should have single-handedly stopped iAcquire from link buying. But to say it was stupid, or to attack the Joel Davis who blogged the story originally, that doesn't seem reasonable, either.
Danny - so you have nothing against Josh for doing the outing post? I know you're an editor, so you might be a little biased in terms of choosing the story over the privacy of a company's own search marketing techniques, good or bad (which is a subject all in itself; we need a massive discussion on the ethics of outing), but do you think he should be put up on a pedestal for all to revel at, because he's the one who broke the news first? What if I told you that one of my sites was contacted by iAcquire a few months back (they even said they were iAcquire), and I didn't go pouting to my blog to tell the world what they were doing, since it's their & their client's risk at stake and up to them how they want to get it done when Google's obviously letting paid links work, what then? Should I look back & see this as a missed opportunity? I just think there's a point where people lose their jobs over lost clients all because of an outing post like this of a company that IMO wasn't doing anything outside of cost/benefit analysis alongside their clients. Hell, if I was a big company that needed SEO, there's no way I'd turn down paid links when they're working like a charm. (Let the firestorm of criticism rain down...)
Yes, they broke Google's TOS. Find me an agency that rides firmly between those lines an I'll be shocked. In the real world, agencies sometimes stoop to doing what works instead of what Google has deemed ethical. That iAcquire has been SO demonized throughout this process, again, seems unfair to me. In some way, shape or form, every single link is a paid link. Would we be having the same discussion if iAcquire had "Sponsored" links by offering bloggers merchandise from their clients? Would we all be clattering our death-drums if iAcquire had been inserting their links into the footers of wordpress themes they created? This whole industry revolves around the "grey area". Technically any and all links we acquire for the purpose of rankings break Google's TOS. The only reason people are so emphatically pointing the finger is because of Mike's outspokenness about content outreach and his claims of being white hat, which I just don't feel like this situation taints. Whatever. There'll be some new sensation next week and we'll all have some new story to get our backs up about. It's SEO. That's how she rolls.
Do you believe Josh did that post to somehow "out" iAcquire as an attempt to win business? Do you believe he did it because he was intending to somehow hurt Mike King's reputation? Do you think he did it because he sat around thinking "ah ha, this will get my little known blog some good link bait?" I think he did it because he got this weird link request sent to him three times in a row, went exploring and found some things that made it add up into something he thought worth writing about. I'm not putting him up on a pedestal about it, but the degree of attacks he's taken over it seem kind of absurd. It gets more absurd when I've seen personally more people rushing to defend Mike than to say maybe cool down on the attacks over Josh. I get that there are some in the SEO space who want to debate whether "outing" should happen or not. When I ran the SEW Forums, I put a policy in place against this, because most of what we saw were people just doing it for some anti-competitive reason. With my news coverage on SEL, we don't run around trying to out people either. There are so many possible targets, so who do we start singling out and why? It's not like our audience doesn't know this happens. Instead, we tend to cover it if it picks up attention in some other places (as we did with JC Penney or Overstock, a NYT and WSJ article, respectively). But Josh's post, he doesn't seem to be an SEO. And for his audience, this might be new. I mean, search his blog -- this is the first time he even has mentioned SEO in blog posts, apparently, going back to when he started in December 2010. I didn't get the impression he looked at this as some type of outing story he shouldn't be doing and damn the SEOs who say no. He seemed to view it as a really weird annoying situation worth writing about as he tracked it further. To give you some perspective, I just wrote a post on my personal blog looking at the absurdities of how the NYT and WSJ are dong multiple price marketing to me. Did I just out them in violation of some secret "you can't talk about newspaper marketing campaigns" industry alliance that I wasn't aware of? Rather than this tiresome debate over whether people should out or not, perhaps it would be more productive to discuss the validity of what gets supposedly outed. Did Josh really have some anti-competitive motivation here? I don't see that. Did he really expose the privacy of a company's search marketing techniques? How private it is it when they contact him three times in a row? What prevented this same type of request being sent over to say an editor at Boing Boing and producing that type of story? I guess in the end, we need a massive discussion on outing? I thought we had that already in 2005. Or was it 2004? Well, I forget, because I'm pretty old. No, I think maybe we need a massive discussion on how if you're going to buy links, you'd better be damn well sure you're not sending stuff out in a way that might get your client outed. Because in the end, there's going to be someone out there who doesn't know nor cares what the "rules" are about outing. They just know they got some weird email on behalf of a major company and might not like it.
Joel, actually we don't know that iAcquire broke Google's rules in the DBCC case. Neither DBCC or iAcquire will confirm anything in regards to that. If the excuse is "everyone does it," then iAcquire should have nothing to fear. In fact, there are plenty of SEOs who will say yeah, we do paid links, we think they're necessary and we'll keep doing it. I can't speak as to why everyone's pointing the finger, as you say. You bet, some people who dislike Mike (which often happens with anyone who gains prominence in speaking or writing) will take a swing at him for preaching white hat while working for a company that now, self-admittedly, has been doing black hat. But heck, even some people who like Mike are going to be wondering about that. But if fingers are going to be pointed, I sure wish they were pointed back to the solicitation of a paid link without any warning to the publisher. That continues to be lost in all this.
How about the FTC Guidelines? That also seems to get lost in all of this (and thank you Danny for standing your ground amongst the trolls). It is literally against the law, from the Federal Trade Commision guidelines on advertising, to pay someone for an advertisement, yet have them purposefully not label it as an advertisement. Buying links is a violation of Google's TOS, but what they asked that blogger to do (Josh Davis in this case) actually violates FEDERAL law. They make no mention of this in the e-mail outreach and I had a lengthy chat with John Doherty where he pointed out to me that many people are simply unaware of the FTC guidelines regarding advertisements, but to me, the leadership at iAcquire knew EXACTLY what they were doing and I believe it implicates Mike King that he would go to work for people who have no problem breaking the law like this, misleading bloggers like this, or quite possibly misleading their clients by not telling Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp (as they claim) that they were never told that anyone would be doing Black Hat SEO vs. just "SEO". I think it speaks volumes about Mike that he'd be associated with those kinds of people. He is now their leader, if he is in fact the "Director" and it wasn't just a token title given to him because they wanted to capitalize on his White Hat reputation to make iAcquire look cleaner than it was. I don't blame Mike, I honestly think he was duped by Joe Griffin, the CEO of iAcquire, into coming to "help us be more White Hat" and that Mike may very well have meant to do just that, but you don't take a Director position and then immediately go out of country for two weeks on a speaking tour. One of these is a Director of a Department - the other is just a figurehead for PR reasons. Joe Griffin paid MILLIONS of dollars to buy Conductor's Link Buying operation, which included the means to pay monthly the websites that they were buying these links from. There was clear intent here, and what I fear is that so many of the armchair commentators on this issue didn't do any more than skim Josh Davis' original blog post so they didn't see how damning the evidence against iAcquire is. And yea, on the privacy front. They contacted Josh directly, THREE TIMES, trying to buy a link on his website. And they were dumb enough to do this while outing their client as Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. They even name the client as "Dun & Bradstreet" not "Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp" as they may have wanted to capitalize on the big Fortune 500 Dun & Bradstreet's reputation. This is going to go to court for a lot of reasons, and dozens if not hundreds of lives will be effected by this. They broke the law, they have damaged brands, they've caused people to lose their jobs, this isn't about outing SEOs, this is about ethics in marketing and doing "whatever it takes" to win. All because some guy was too lazy to register a unique fax number. =)
Was Mike hired by iAcquire to help clean up their linking practices or to help them sell more of them?
I suppose that's a good question.
At the same time, were the marketing Execs for Enron responsible for the accounting "errors"?
Enron didn't sell marketing though, iAcquire does. Complicates the issue a bit.
That's an honest question. I'm not aware of him being involved with those sort of practices prior to joining iAcquire, so it's hard to know for sure. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. I think that's all we can do for anybody that ends up in a situation like this.
To be honest I didn't mean it in terms of Mike actually selling a service that includes paid links. What I mean is his high profile arrival would have helped iAcquire gain new business regardless of the actual service provided.
Pause break - great discussion, this is what the comments on Inbound should always be like.
Joel, You hit the nail on the head. If you are doing anything to your website or on the internet to "build links" your manipulating the system therefore breaking the guidelines set forth by Google. Things like "outreach" this term is a joke, why outreach? I think IAquire was doing outreach, but instead of doing it in a convoluted way (building something to link to) and emailing people asking them to link to it, in some way, they just asked for the link. Now they really got greedy, they were hunting for killer links and would not accept anything less then EXACTLY what they wanted (which is why they are jammed up). Link Bait (some silly shoe info-graphic), are you building this to sell more shoes? No your doing it to manipulate the SERPs by getting more links. It is just a shitty part of what we do, and pointing fingers is just a waste of time. Every SEO in the world has bought links, sponsored events for links, supported non-profits etc. We have all done things with the intention of manipulating the SERP's. End of story. Michael King is a brilliant writer, and probably a great SEO. Did he know of "anything" probably, but even if he was trying to change things are IAquire, I hardly think it could be done in 2 months. I mean apparently IAquire has been buying links for quite sometime, and change takes time.
"Let he who is without sin throw the first stone". - Half of the people condemning iAcquire have worse practices than they do. But hey, everyone loves a bandwagon. The industry needs fixing, our mentalities need fixing, we all need to get better at what we do. It'd be much better if we focused on the fact that Mike has created resources that help make SEO's better at their jobs than somehow entangling him in the oh-so-horrible purchase of a few links.
SEO Moves, that's just not correct. Google encourages people to build links in a variety of ways and absolutely does not consider doing anything to be a violation. In fact, it has often at times even suggested things like sponsoring non-profits might even be acceptable. There can definitely be some debate over what constitutes a paid link, such as if someone getting a giveaway and then linking to a company counts. It can be a very confusing space. But in the case that Josh outlined, there was no grey area. It wasn't one of those confusing situations. It was a straight-up request for a link with specific anchor text for payment, which any good SEO would clearly understand was against Google's guidelines. They might still decide to do it anyway, of course, but they'd have known it was a violation.
Fine and fair. It's a violation (as outlined in the post). Again, I'm not at all trying to attack the blogger. He had every right to post what he did, and no, I don't think he necessarily did it out of any spite. The chance for traffic and recognition? Well, it may or may not have crossed his mind. To be clear, Danny, I agree with most of what you're saying. Perhaps my frustration is misplaced, perhaps I should be more upset with those who responded to the post than the post itself. All I know is that while the allegations are certainly not great, it was disappointing to watch an individual more or less become the embodiment for the corporation, earned or not, whether the intent of the blogger or not. I guess I'm sort of barking at shadows.
I really think Danny has made some great points in this thread and the SEO community should listen to them. If the argument is that everyone buys links (and a large % of people do), then why do we have so many conferences like SMX where there is presentation after presentation around white hat link practices that the top agencies are using. Are these even being used at all? and for people paying for these events, surely it should be a necessity that the tactics preached actually work (personally i really feel there should be more case studies e.g. prove it). Or is it all smoke and mirrors. How many of those people go back to their companies and just start doing what "everyone" else does, bending the rules to meet their client needs and ensures they maintain their margins (content strategies are a lot more expensive and the results are not guaranteed). Mike is obviously a smart dude and iAcquire has been buying links for quite some time (Aaron Wall did a post on them 2 years ago), so I am sure it's nothing do do with him. But that doesn't mean the blogger wasn't entitled to use his name. As Danny said, he simple followed the trail back to their Inbound Marketing director. I think the problem was Mike or someone from iAcquire should of given a response far sooner than they did. Look at SEOMoz as an example. Complete transparency in cases like this will stop people spreading so many stories about you. I don't like outing, but I do feel for outsiders, the SEO industry can appear like a cartel at times. In this case we have people attacking the blogger because "everyone buys links" and Google's TOS are nonsense This may be may be true, but hardly a great reflection on us as an industry. We are caught breaking the rules and it's everyones fault bar our own. I am actually on the side of those who say outing is wrong, but in this case I also think some of the SEO'ers defense doesn't quite stack up.
Kieran you're absolutely right and that's one of the big problems with all of this. SEOs go out to SMX or whatever and they come back telling their boss "I learned lots of cool White Hat stuffs!" and then they go back to building Forum Comments and Directory spam and calling it Link Building. That's the problem, it's an industry wide symptom of "The Emperor's New Clothes" and no one wants to come out and admit that they've got no clue what they're doing. SEO is hard, and all these blogs and videos and conferences are giving people who haven't got a clue amunition that helps them cast the appearance of a plan because of course, if you went to SMX a bunch of times, subscribe to SEOmoz, and follow Mike King on Twitter, you too are an amazing White Hat, Content Driven, Link Builder! Right? The reality is a lot different than that, and a LOT of SEO companies out there are only in this business because it's easy to make money selling SEO. Follow the money, just like anything else. Unlike anything else sadly, we aren't lawyers, or doctors, or chefs, there is no health code that covers SEO, or a State Bar Association that we have to keep happy. We are a Multi Billion Dollar, unpoliced, industry. And this will keep happening because of that.
In regards to Mike King, I know a month ago he was in Sydney- Australia for a good 1-2 weeks, he gave some really great talks at the conference, this was just pretty much just after he started at iAcquire, I know he is on the road a lot he probably has not been in the office to really go over the finer details of what was going on. If you are very new to a business you can't exactly walk in and start telling senior management how things are run it takes time/ processes need to be developed.
Even if he DID know, it takes time to transition away from those tactics no matter who your leadership is.
James: this is the outcome when you parade around on conferences instead of doing the actual work you hired entry level employees for instead. I've noticed that many agencies work like that, the great names are only there for the image while the hands on work is done by nameless low paid drones, sometimes even outsourced at the other end of the world.
I think that's the role he wants to do is more of a brand ambassador for the business, and these roles were probably pre arranged before he even started at iAcquire, if you speak at a conference it is not something that happens over night you have to apply a few months prior, I know becuase I spoke at the SMX Sydney conference with him. Regardless I feel sorry for Mike King I think he has been portrayed as something he is not.
Danny, Yes Google encourages you to build links, well I sort of agree. Except why do they put this very vague set of rules in place? Even in your example "sponsoring non-profits might even be acceptable" you put the words "might"? Well is it or isn't it? These guidelines are just not enough information (to know whats right and whats wrong). Even someone like you Danny who has been around the block more than most has to use words like "might". If Google laid out the rules and clearly let people know what is and is not ok, it would be so much easier to provide your clients with right information. Instead we have to play these guessing games. I do not disagree that IAquire 100% screwed up, I just do not understand why Google is always so secretive about everything, it causes all of these problems. I do not agree that IAquire totally BLEW it, their greed for a VERY specific link, screwed them. They should have said, sure you can label the link as sponsored, or make it no follow (I would have) but because they pushed for the perfect link they got jammed up.
That's true on some tactics, not on others. Paying for links is one of those strategies that we are all pretty clear on. Google turfed their own chrome site out of the index because of this.
At the end of the day, Google wants to create a good experience for their Search Engine users. Not for the users, but because if people aren't using Google, they also aren't clicking on Ads. That is why Google has Gmail, and Google Docs, and Google+ and Google Calendar all as a free platform, because they want to keep you ON GOOGLE. That is the root of the entire "Google vs. Facebook" battle, Google doesn't like that people spend so much time on Facebook because while they are on Facebook, they cannot be reached by Google's Ads. So if you create something of value on the internet, and you EARN links, that is fine in Google's books because what you've created is also worthy of showing up in their search results. If something gets a lot of Likes or Tweets or Shares on Facebook, whatever, it must be pretty cool, so it's also WORTHY of showing up in Google's Search Results. It's the difference between Marketing, and Advertising. Google wants you to MARKET your website, not ADVERTISE it. And if you're going to advertise it, they want you to either pay them through AdWords, or label the advertisement as such via the "No Follow" tag. Having a contest that gives away a product to bloggers who then might link to the product or talk about it, is Marketing. Not advertising. Is it still PAYING for that attention? Sure! But it's creating something worth talking about. Some paid links, some "endorsed content" might actually be great content, but it's when the website everyone is linking to via paid links is crap, and that crap is what then shows up on Google's search results, that Google gets upset. Google doesn't want CRAP showing up in their search results, because that makes people trust the Google system less, and if they trust Google less, they click on fewer AdWords ads, and Google makes less money. Does that make Google evil? I mean, we're paying them, via ad clicks, for this wonderful service they provide that is their search engine. I have no problem with them policing it however they like. Some SEOs are in Advertising, some are in Marketing, those of us who are actual Marketers are the ones that Google loves, because we're creating materials for the sole purpose of selling a product, but we find a way, we fight through writers block, whatever, to create something of amusement, of value, of entertainment, in order to get there. We don't just write a check and hope for the best. Savvy?