If you unpick the approach of absolutely anyone in the industry you will find issues. We just don’t have the resource to open an entire new branch of the debate surrounding elements of our business so please don’t think we are being evasive – we really do have to get on with some client work.

Our technology exists to support the team and the process, not in place of them.

The words ‘automation’ and ‘technology’ are hugely emotive, particularly in this industry. Simon has personally and carefully designed, built and constantly refined all of our systems by hand over the last 6 years. Again, the technology exists to support the team and the process, not in place of them. Humans are at the centre of our business. We are therefore a combination of people, process and technology.

All we were trying to do in the previous post was to provide an honest acknowledgement that the results of this combination are not always perfect. By “Client / market conditions” we mean that whatever your approach, in 2009, fewer people are willing to become involved in linking than they were even a couple of years ago — in no small part as a result of precisely the type of debate we have seen over the last few days — coupled with the activities of less scrupulous firms. Clients are under ever more financial pressure themselves – and some of them are very small businesses trying to get a foothold. All of us in this industry therefore have to be as efficient as is reasonably possible in delivering acceptable results to their clients. It is a delicate balancing act and the balance is not always perfect – we totally accept that.

The net output of our activities is relevant links and content for all parties: our clients, their link partners and the search engines. We try extremely hard to minimise any compromise inherent in achieving this and it is a process of continuous improvement. On the occasions upon which we get it wrong, we react promptly, professionally and courteously and we do our best to learn from it.

Finally, perhaps to put this thread into perspective, we have had many notes of support through from our clients, partners and various other contacts in the industry over the last few days. Quite a few of them have been saying how they can’t believe the intensity of the debate surrounding our approach given the activities they see on their own sites every day from some well known SEO players and firms, blatantly offering payment for links and all sorts of other trickery which it wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss here.

That doesn’t leave us feeling smug or by any means complacent – quite the contrary – we feel privileged to be involved in this industry and to have the clients, partners and capabilities that we have today. We will continue to work hard to improve what we do for all parties now and in the future.

Thanks and kind regards – Simon & Kieron

What conditions cause you to use technology(automated tools im guessing)?

Im sorry but thats just bad SEO. if your pitching your company as a “quality” service then offer quality not automated spam. that sort of talk gives the industry a bad name. Automation has no place in this industry in any circumstances.

There some isolated areas where targeting isn’t 100% which we are constantly working to address. Client / market conditions mean that we have to use technology as well as human review at the top of the process. All dialogues with responding partners thereafter are managed in great detail by experienced account managers in our UK team. Despite our systems being over a million lines of server code located on multiple servers, they are still not perfect and we sometimes unintentionally contact sites that are definitely off-theme - blogs and sites that rank well for diverse themes are a classic example of this. We constantly monitor this across all campaigns - always working to improve.

However . . .

The most important thing here is that we won’t actually end up establishing links (content-for-links or otherwise) with off-theme sites - if an off-theme site responds, we will apologise and explain that we got it wrong - this happens sometimes and the dialogues are almost invariably cordial in the end. This is also used as input to further improving targeting as above - we try very hard not to make the same mistake twice. There are also endless controls in our systems to ensure we don’t bombard specific sites - the only people that tend to see more than one approach in 45 days (the current threshold) regardless of relevance are the tiny percentage of people that own lots of multiple, ranked domains. It sounds as though you could be in that position.

On the rare occasions when this occurs - and I’ll say the same the same thing here - we’re always happy to exclude a list of domains for a given site owner. Our exclusions system is fairly sophisticated, excluding for a variety of reasons and at different levels with different effects - so we can generally make sure we opt you out of any approaches that wouldn’t be of benefit to you but not necessarily prevent dialogues for other appropriate themes - all driven by your preferences.

Hope that’s helpful and please don’t hesitate to ask if you need more help or information.

Best regards - Simon & Kieron

I would argue though, when a car insurance comparison site using your system requests my blog about PPC/SEO (the one in my signature) as a relevant on topic blog to add content to, your targeting is probably a little out IMO.

I also received another e-mail to another website I own, again completely off topic and non relevant to the subject matter.

Perhaps you can argue that you can tailor any piece of content to any site, but I think there is a line.

If I have received two e-mails like that, I would say you probably need to take a look at the quality of your system and improve it’s relevancy.

“We genuinely believe that the content will be helpful to the link partner”

I guess you have to argue that or the whole thing falls apart.

It might well have some truth to it, but on the whole average content for average content sake there will be little benefit. But if webmasters can approve/decline the articles, it’s their choice and fair enough.

At last someone from the SEO community who is making sense. Far too many blog sites blindly rush in after spotting something and post sensational ‘tabloid’ attention headlines to create a stir. Others than read that post, make 1+1=5 and you have a conspiracy theory with no basis of truth.

Has GoCompare received a penalty – we don’t know and will never know.

Has the site redesign got something to do with their positions – probably, but again will never know for sure.

Is content for links back hat and against Google TOS – no.

Will

Insiders View - You come on here and you say you “largely agree” with Kieron’s response and yet yesterday you felt obliged to call content-for-links ‘black hat’ and INCORRECTLY said that it involved “a standard cooperative link exchange”.

This is NOT TRUE.

You also said that GoCompare are “back to their old link building tricks”.

Again, NOT TRUE.

Correct me if I am wrong but their “old link building tricks” involved buying pay per post links on US blogs. They may have some new link building tricks, but they are not back to their old ones.

I am all for hearing both sides of the story, however if you are going to stick your head above the parapet with what are (in your own words!) “potentially damaging allegations” against perfectly legitimate businesses then you have a responsibility to get your facts right. The last two days has brought out the worst the industry has to offer in terms of so called SEO experts who simply jump on the bandwagon rather than present a well reasoned argument that can stand up to scrutiny.

And actually I don’t care whether GoCompare have a penalty, and I don’t care whether they have slipped because they have redesigned their site, all I care about is CREDIBILITY, and some people are fast losing theirs!

As I always say, these are my opinions.