You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one:
Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large.
If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it's pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It's a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn't be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you're selling, and, generally, be a "good match" for what the user wants. - Googley Jon Rockway
Would love to hear someone more senior confirm this as the official Google company position, however they are too skilled at public relations to make that blunder (at least outside of foreign AdWords ads that tell you to "forget SEO").
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.
With a limited number of recoveries nearly a year after Panda, the first bite might seem like a big concern, however the "too many ads" algorithm updates far more frequently than Panda does:
If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.
And for those who got hit by Panda then tried to make up for those lower ad revenues with more AdSense ad units, they probably just got served round #2 of Panda Express. ;)
However Google has such a rich data set with AdSense that I don't think they would just look at layout. If I were them I would factor in all sorts of metrics like
AdSense CTR
average page views per visitor
repeat visits & brand searches
bounce rate
clickstream data from Chrome & the Google toolbar (so even if you are using other ad networks, they can still sample the data)
Some sites are primarily driven off of mobile views while other sites might be seen on large monitors. When Google sees every page load & measures the CTRs, tacking actual user response is better than guestimating it.
They could come up with some pretty good metrics from those & then for any high traffic/high earning site they could manually review them to see if they deserve to get hit or not & adjust + refine the "algorithm" until those edge cases disappeared. Google's lack of credible competition in contextual & display ads means they can negotiate pretty tough terms with publishers that they feel are not adding enough value to the ecosystem.
It's Not Just Algorithms Cleaning Up AdSense
In addition to these sorts of algorithms, over the past year they have manually hit networks of sites with the doorway pages label & disabled ad serving on sites or entire accounts where they felt there was a bit too much arbitrage. One of our SEO Book members pointed me to this thread where a lot of Pakistani AdSense accounts got torched last October & another sent me a sample termination email from Google similar to this one:
Notice that in the above:
There was no claim of click fraud, copyright issues, or anything like that.
There was no claim of advertiser complaints.
Google offers no customer support phone number, no "you might want to work on this" advice, doesn't list which of the sites in the account they felt could be improved, and RETROACTIVELY nuked past "earnings" ... depending on where it is in the schedule that can amount to anywhere from 30 to 50+ days (I remember Teeceo mentioned how they waited until the day before the AdSense payday to smoke his stuff way back in the day to have maximum impact!)
On Google's latest quarterly earnings call they highlighted how year on year Google's revenues were up 25% but the network revenues only grew at 15%. They also explained the slower network revenue growth as being associated with improved search quality & algorithm updates like Panda.
Left unsaid in such a statement was that until those algorithms rolled out, Google admitted they funded spam. ;) The whole AdSense & content farm problem was created through incentive structures with unintended consequences.
Is the Garbage Disappearing, or Just Moving to a New Landfill?
If you track what is going on with the Google+ over-promotion (long overdue post coming on that front shortly!) or how Google is still pre-paying Demand Media to upload video "content" to Youtube, Google still may be funding the same model, but doing so while gaining a tighter control of relevancy so they can better sort good stuff from crap (when you host content & track user response you have all the metrics in the world to determine how relatively good you think it is). If they over-promote these sites then in the short run they create the same skewed business model problem.
Sure hosting the user experience makes it easier to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the other big risk here is the impact on the rest of the publishing ecosystem. There will be lots of thin spam from popular people on Google+ (anyone launched a celebrity-focused Pay-Per-Plus site yet?) & in-depth editorial content might not be economically feasible in certain categories where there literally is no organic SERP above the fold.
I will complement them on their efforts to clean up some of the worst offenses (from the prior generation of "bad incentives"). If you were hit by it, Panda was every bit as big/brutal as the famous Florida update. If this update is anything near as significant as the Panda update (in how it impacts smaller independent webmasters) then it is going to force more of them/us to move up the value chain.
That may mean pain in the short run, but (for those who take it as a wake up call to develop brand & organic non-search traffic streams) far more rewards in the longrun for those who remain after the herd is thinned.
My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.
I think for many SEOs the idea of starting over is painful, but the best SEOs often enjoy the forced evolution & the game of it all. They don't roll over & play dead or forget SEO. And if Google didn't put hard resets in every once in a while, then the big hedge funds would be mopping up the SERPs and cleaning our clocks with the help of Helicopter Ben.
Areas For Improvement
Of course this could be taken as a positive post toward Google (and it mostly is), but I don't want to come across as a fanboi, so I thought I should do a shout out to a couple things they still need to fix in order to be consistent:
If Google is going to tell people that thick deep content is needed to gain sustainable exposure then they shouldn't be ranking thin + pages in the SERPs just because it is a Google product. Even people who have *always* given Google the benefit of the doubt (full on fanbois) found the Google+ placement in the SERPs distasteful.
Google's AdSense is still sending out some of those automated "you are leaving money on the table" styled emails reminding publishers to use 3 ad units. If such behavior may lead to a smoke job, then the recommendation shouldn't be offered in the first place. Right below the "use 3 ad units" there needs to be a "proceed with caution" styled link (in red) that links to the recent "too many ads" post.
Old case studies that are no longer in line with best practices in the current market should have some sort of notice/notification added to them so new webmasters don't get the wrong idea.
Some of the AdSense heatmaps are roadmaps to penalization. These should have been fixed before yesterday's announcement, but if they are still up there next week then Google is willfully & intentionally trying to destroy any small business owner that follows that "best practice" advice.
Your Feedback Needed
Since this update impacted far fewer sites than the Panda update, there are fewer sample/example sites. Did any of your websites get hit? If so, how would you describe ...
According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google "Get Your Business Online", disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google.
A few select quotes:
There are absolutely no costs, and this will be agreed on before it?s put on? No one will come and tell you like Mocality used to do, someone tells you it?s free and then they come to ask for money. You know that Google doesn?t fool around here. ... Mocality used to charge people and many of the people who used to be in Mocality we have taken them and transferred them here. Didn?t we also find you on Mocality? ... Ai?they used to?but some people didn?t used to pay. They [Mocality] used to go and ask people to pay them around Ksh. 20,000 and people refused. It was things like that.)
Google's business model *is* buying or building things that are free and then later pulling back features and/or sneaking costs in on them. Whether it be clubbing Android carriers with compatibility, saying search ads are evil then placing them everywhere, Google Maps API terms changes, terms changes on the Google AdWords API, Google hotel place listings with endless price ads, or keyword (not provided) in web analytics while trying to force you to register in Google Webmaster Tools to get any keyword data at all!
As if that wasn't bad enough, when the fake business asked Google if Mocality was ok with this, this was the exchange:
My question is does Mocality know that you?re getting their con?our contacts from their directory? ~~~ Yah. They know. They know that very well. They have agreed with Google when they were on that thing.
I have long stated that the difference between spam and quality content is who is spamming. With the recent widely criticized over-promotion of Google+ in the search results and this sort of scrape, lie & disintermediate the source Google's true character is shining through.
Facebook & Twitter are smart not to leave the barn door open for Google.
All information wants to be free and wrapped in Google's ads. Or so the saying goes. But until they can be trusted it won't be. They have done A LOT of brand damage to themselves in the past couple months.
Update: Google was mortified that they got caught doing this:
We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality?s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We?ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We?re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we?ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.
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.
Recently we had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite link building experts, Melanie Nathan. Melanie has been involved in online marketing since 2003 and is a wonderful writer on all things link building in addition to being a well-respected link builder by her peers.
Melanie runs CanadianSEO, an internet marketing company based in Canada. You can check out some of her posts from the web here, follow her on Twitter here, and follow her on Google Plus here.
We hope you enjoy the interview!
So I see you started your career by running a successful e-commerce store, which you then sold off to a US company and then you moved into the client side of things. When did this all start and how did you decide to get into online, e-commerce stuff?
The e-commerce stuff started in 2003. My husband and I were operating a successful brick and mortar auto repair/aftermarket accessory store in Edmonton, where my husband?s dad (a skilled mechanic) would fix the vehicles and we would bling them up with cool accessories like euro tail lights and hid lighting kits. When we found out that our main manufacturer would be willing to drop ship their products directly to our North American customers, starting an online store seemed like no-brainer.
I fell in love with SEO shortly after that, mostly through experimentation with various e-commerce shopping carts and my frustration at not being able to find a decent one (at the time).
Some SEO's love the idea of running their own sites rather than working on client sites based on the difference between the ratio of profits to labor on your own sites versus client sites (relatively speaking). Some SEO's like doing both to help diversify their income streams, and some like pure client work. What lead you to decide to get into the client side of things?
I?m happy working for clients because I have a genuine interest in helping people and it?s extremely gratifying being able to impact someone?s life in such a way. On top of that, the work is constantly changing and I can pick and choose my projects therefore it never gets boring.
If there?s a downside, it?s that I don?t get many opportunities to experiment with different techniques or work on personal projects. This is why I?ve been slowly making time for the leap into the ?other? side of SEO (tool creation, affiliate marketing and yes, even some BHT) with some domains I own.
I figure, if I?m offering professional services, it?s best to be as experienced as possible in order to best serve my clients. If this leads to me eventually moving away from the client side of SEO though, then I might be open to the possibility.
If you?re interested in co-developing a link building tool or an affiliate site, ping me and we?ll talk ;)
You're well-known as a link building expert and you've written extensively on the subject. Can you walk us through how you approach/plan out a new client's plan (generally speaking) and talk about which tools you use and why?
Site owners mainly hire me in order to see measurable movement in the SERPs for their top keyphrases. This means, to help my clients stand out (where Google is concerned), I first need to see what they?re up against. I therefore always start with competitive research.
Among the tools I use are; SEOmoz Open Site Explorer & Competitive Link Research Tool. I?ve also been using SEOProfiler Competitive Backlink Intelligence tool lately. I also use Yahoo Site Explorer (I?ll sure miss this when it?s gone!) and, of course, Google itself.
I look for such things as; rankings of the site, number of root domains linking, quality of backlinks, backlink velocity and social media mentions. Once I chart out what each competitor?s link profile looks like, what I need to do in order to differentiate my client, becomes pretty apparent.
After that, it?s all about looking for prospects and then developing realistic ways to acquire links from them.
I read, and actually have Evernoted (is that the new word for bookmarking?) your Search Engine Journal post on "6 Super Tips For Creating a Natural Link Profile" and some of things you talk about there (back in 2010) might have helped sites weather parts of this latest Panda parade of updates.
Those tips are logical, solid, but require a good amount of work. Do you find that link building failures are a result of trying to look for shortcuts too often or just not being willing to really put a lot of natural effort into link building?
Thank you for Evernoting (love this) and mentioning that post.
In my experience, the majority of link building failures happen simply because the linkee was too busy thinking about THEIR needs rather than the needs of the linker. They also take shortcuts that often decrease their own chances, such as; sending bad email pitches and/or using generic email subject lines and/or using poor grammar etc.
Link building offers awesome rewards, but it can be an incredible amount of effort. If you?re unwilling or unable to put in that effort, I guarantee you?ll be disappointed with the results.
Of course, in some areas these kinds of natural links can be harder (sometimes much harder) between different sites. Do you think link building opportunities are existent enough in each market irrespective of the competition (big brands, strong sites, etc)?
Or, is it more of a budget issue on the client side when it comes to being unable to complete for really competitive stuff?
I?m always up for a challenge and I have yet to encounter a niche or market where links weren?t readily obtainable. Unfortunately, sometimes the techniques required to attract those links, just don?t fit within the client?s budget. In these cases, I recommend starting out small and, as the client sees more and more ROI, they?re happy to increase their budget. After all, some link building is better than no link building.
As far as eventually competing on a large scale, I?ll just say that most people grossly underestimate the power that high-quality links can have.
What are the key points you look for when identifying link opportunities? Do you consider pure link value to rankings and/or consider links that might be no-follow if they have the potential to bring targeted traffic to the site?
The main thing I focus on when selecting link prospects is; relevance. The link absolutely has to make sense or I won?t waste my client?s time on it.
After that, I look at the overall quality (How many links on the page? Is there any PR? Does it rank for anything?) and, to save a bit of time, I like to run it through the Raven Quality Analyzer (which tells me how many backlinks, indexed pages, age of domain etc). I do all of this in order to determine how much Google trusts the site and the likelihood of a link from the site directly affecting my client?s rankings.
As for nofollow links, let?s face it, clients don?t pay me to get them links that aren?t heavy hitting so I generally don?t pursue them (unless there?s a specific reason for doing so such as trying to help a paid link profile appear more natural). I don?t build links in humongous quantities though, so it all evens out.
If you?re building links for your own site though, I would never recommend turning down a link that makes sense?. even if it was nofollow.
As a provider of services, I see that you also offer a full suite of services. Has that evolved over the years from being mostly a link building company to now being a full service company?
Do you find this differentiates you from other providers and is that well-rounded approach one you'd recommend for someone starting a link building company today?
CanadianSEO has always offered a full line of SEO services, however over the years I?ve learned from experience that it?s the LINKS that get you where you need to be in Google hence why I?ve made link building my main focus. I now look at web design/site optimization and content creation as necessary steps in making sure your link efforts will have the desired effect.
Not sure if this sets me apart, but my clients are happy therefore I would probably recommend this approach to anyone running a SEO company. You absolutely have to be capable of attracting/acquiring/sourcing valuable links though, and this is something that apparently not every SEO is willing (or able) to do.
So let's say you are advising me on how to become a better link builder or a better manager of link building teams. What would your top 3 points be and what are maybe the top 3 myths or over-hyped points I should avoid?
Become a better link builder/manager by a) developing a system for tracking progress b) learning how to be persuasive to get what you want and c) never sacrificing quality in order to meet a deadline or fill a quota.
As far as myths, it may surprise many people to learn that both paid and reciprocal links are still effective as part of an overall link building strategy. I?m always trying to emphasize that Google doesn?t know as much about your links as you think it does. Especially when it comes to how your links are obtained. Yes, they do watch for certain obvious things (rate of links acquired, unnatural use of anchor text etc) but it?s totally ok to be creative. In fact it?s best. As long as you?re being logical, you?ll get the results you?re looking for.
Other than that, I still roll my eyes at people who say PageRank doesn?t matter when it comes to links. Hi, um, have you heard that Google still uses PR as a metric of quality? I?d like to offer those same peeps a link from a relevant PR0 or a link from a relevant PR7 and see which one they jump at.
Not that PR should be the ONLY metric you use when determining the value of a link prospect, but if you?re interested in making any impact on your rankings, it should definitely be taken into consideration.
For tracking link building efforts and for tracking the links you secure, do you use tools for that (like Raven or Buzzstream) or do you do that internally?
I still do it all internally/manually via custom Excel reports. Guess I?m still old-school in that regard.
A typical link report includes such data as; link URL, link anchor text, Google cache date, Raven Quality Score, relevancy info, link type, PR and link status. It has everything my clients need in order to see the progress of their link campaigns and its also great for keeping me organized as I?m often building links for many sites at once.
Please tell us what you think are going to be the most important aspects of link building going forward in this age of rapid algorithm changes and social signals?
Many people assume that link development is decreasing in importance, but this is far from the case. Links are still the simplest way for search engine spiders to judge the reliability of a webpage. However, the way that search engines view links is changing.
I?ve definitely seen (what I consider to be) evidence that Google is using social media mentions as a measure of quality. In an age where Facebook ?likes?, Tweets and Google +1?s can be readily bought and sold though, one has to wonder about the longevity of such a system.
I almost feel sorry for Google in that no matter what they try to use as a measure of quality, there will always be ways to game it. I think this is precisely why they?re trying to move away from organic SERPs by diversifying them so much. It?s an imperfect system and I seriously don?t envy the position they?ve put themselves in.
As always, those that can keep up and adapt, will ultimately have the most success.
----
Thanks for your time Melanie! You can stay up to date with Melanie over at Twitter and Google Plus.
Melanie runs the show over at CanadianSEO.Com; a web marketing firm that offers web design, SEO, link building, and content creation services.
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.
"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." ... 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. ... 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. ... 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.
