White Hat SEO

Our clients always seek our our expert opinions in the findability arena. As a white hat findability company, we always keep our clients safe by sticking with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Last year, one of our clients approached us and asked our opinion on Conductor. One of their board members had suggested Conductor as an SEO firm for companies with a large number of keywords/SKUs.

We advised our client that Conductor operated more in the gray-black hat arena (i.e., borderline “spammy”) and did not feel it aligned with our strategic/content-oriented/white-hat approach.

Our client understood the difference (they had heard us refer to black and white hat SEO often, including in the roundtable ) and agreed that our approach was preferred.

Fast forward to this year: on 2/16/11, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, posted at the Google webmaster thread

People on this thread have already mentioned Conductor, and I've confirmed
multiple times that paid links that pass PageRank via Conductor violate our
guidelines.

Conductor Exits The Paid Link Network Business

Matt Cutts’ comments seem pretty clear. Using Conductor’s paid link network is seen by Google as a manipulation of their ranking algorithms and is against their guidelines. Conductor appears to have seen the writing on the wall because just days before this discussion, Conductor posted to their blog that they will no longer be offering any link-building services. They have sold the assets to another company (whose services will presumably also be in violation of Google’s guidelines).

Lastly, we are happy to see only positive impact to our clients’ results with Google’s recent, big algorithm change that has affected 12% of the search queries.