A point which was slightly glossed over: ‘everyone’s doing it so are Google going to punish everyone’. Well, obviously a mass penalty to all ‘offenders’ would see the quality of the SERPs decline instantly and Google’s customers wouldn’t see the brands they’d expect. So Google aren’t likely to do that – but it doesn’t mean that it is “ethically” right or wrong, inside or outside of the TOS (opinions on interpretation aside). It’s a sign of the complexities Google faces rather than anything else.

It’s going to take a little bit of thinking time to come to a conclusion on this one – for myself at least. But Simon, your answers and honesty to the questions put to you is of great value. At moment, I’m inclined to believe that your service technically falls outside of the TOS but that it is removed in some form from the link buying networks. It’s certainly a grey area, not white but perhaps not black.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&num=100&q=go+compare&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK|countryGB

Best regards – Simon
Simon Snelling BSc(Hons) MBCS CEng CITP
Partner and Co-Founder
Content Now LLP

Dropping back in as requested.

Regards our handling of content partners that decline to publish content or publish it with the link removed:-

Even the very largest corporate campaigns only involve a modest number (tens not hundreds) of content partners on a monthly basis — we are careful not to fall foul of guidelines as to excessive linking — and since partners acting this way are a very small percentage this isn’t a major issue.

We never forget that we initiated the dialogue. We therefore treat all partners with courtesy regardless of their behaviour.

We have never taken, threatened or even implied legal action against a content partner. We regard litigation or indeed the threat of litigation as a last resort under extreme circumstances.

In almost all campaigns our editorial team are creating the content (a few clients in highly specialised areas write content but these are the exception rather than the rule) so the financial risk is ours, not the client’s. To remain viable as a business (our margins are not as high as people may assume), we reserve the right to re-use any content that partners state is not going to be published which I think is fair.

If a partner publishes the content without the link, we will check with them as to whether this was intentional and work to rectify it if at all possible – more often than not it is a problem with their CMS or publishing systems stripping out or breaking links. Those deliberately taking this approach tend not to respond or indeed to opt out of any further communications (which of course we respect). We reserve the right to re-allocate and re-use the content for another partner. However, we recognise the importance of uniqueness in content. Since the first partner will almost certainly be treated as the canonical instance of that content; and since content requirements are unique for each partner, in practice any re-use would involve significant re-work to ensure relevance and uniqueness.

Content partners deliberately behaving in this fashion are simply excluded from any further campaigns for which they would otherwise have been relevant (i.e. present in the search engines or other public sources for terms or classifications relevant to another client – remember we don’t raid our own databases for potential partners).

We realise that there are a few SEO firms who have taken the “fingers up” approach on behalf of their clients – you guys referred to an example quoted on one of the other blogs. I’ll let everyone form their own conclusions as to the ethics involved. From our perspective, however, this is at least an endorsement of the value of the content we produce so thank you whoever you are.

Obviously we’re not insane and our systems and procedures are fairly advanced. If we found that anyone was deliberately and systematically (on a significant scale) abusing the approach we would of course need to take steps to protect ourselves but we believe that this is in practice unlikely and it certainly doesn’t apply to isolated instances.

Ultimately, as with any area of life, we have found that most people are honest and that working with them with integrity and in a relaxed, courteous way is the right approach for everyone involved.

To follow up briefly (yes I know Simon – brief – LOL) regards Google commenting on this particular debate. Per my earlier comments in this thread, I can completely understand why they may not. To start to comment on the specifics of tactics is an open ended commitment – what about this one? That one? . . . We have seen how a debate can so easily spiral. More importantly the algorithms, as we all see, are constantly refined with the weightings of specific elements constantly changing.

Whilst Google has historically commented on tactics that are clearly and deliberately designed to manipulate rankings on a massively unfair basis without delivering value to all parties, at the very least I think the debate of the last few days has highlighted that the subject at hand is a complex area.

More importantly, as with so many elements of SEO, I suspect that there may not be a definitive answer. The algorithms are refined to act as effectively as possible on the data made available to them. The net output of a properly managed content-for-links approach is fresh content and modest numbers of relevant links. The net output of many linking schemes (including paid links) tends to be mad numbers of links, often of questionable relevance; co-operative networks and so forth.

The ultimate measure of the efficacy of a particular approach is in results. This debate started because a site alleged to be using this approach appears to have had some kind of penalty (sorry for the stiff wording – legal constraints on any comments – see our own post way above in this thread for details). There have been a number of views and suggestions as to why this may have been and we have no evidence that suggests a penalty for our client base.

Basically we take input from senior industry contacts and a large number of clients, partners and other industry sources in adopting the best approach we can. I believe the industry is destined to work this way in the long run and for the good of all of us – the results ultimately make us self-accountable.

Right – got to whizz off again – busy day ahead!

All the best – Simon

Simon Snelling
Partner and Co-Founder
Content Now LLP

“And then Matt Cutts to give Googles take and we’d have it all!”

We can but dream!

“Maybe Simon can drop back and clarify the situation regards the contracts, tracking and potential use of the law. Then at least we have all the facts and can go away and make our own minds up!”

Yep, totally agree.

And then Matt Cutts to give Googles take and we’d have it all!

Maybe Simon can drop back and clarify the situation regards the contracts, tracking and potential use of the law. Then at least we have all the facts and can go away and make our own minds up!

Yes it’s rare to see an actual debate in SEO nowadays, everyone being so into “gurus” and accepted wisdom rather than looking in more depth and trying to work out what actually is going on.

Anyway, As regards the contracts between the site that receives the content and Content Now, I haven’t been down the path of being offered “content” so I don’t have access to the actual terms and conditions you have to accept when taking content in exchange for a link.

But the FAQ is clear, they will chase people who don’t include the link and will ask for the link to be reinstated or the content to be removed, and the fact they keep an active tracking system going to ensure the links stay as long as their client pays the bills. I imagine they are unlikely to sue anyone who doesn’t comply when its only over 400 words hence why the chap on the other blog was happy to stick two fingers up at them, but 90% of people you just threaten with legal action will comply with your request.

With the PR, anything that is solicited if discovered Google would whack, its very hard for Google to spot wining and dining, theres only so far the Google all seeing eye can get.

The way I have observed Google operating the easier it is to catch someone doing something manipulative the lesser the penalty, so reciprocal linking, article sites etc which are easy to spot they just devalue the links and forget about it, let people waste their time.

The more tricky ones such as paid links where (I believe they just devalue more and more algorithmically on these) to detect the harsher the penalty when someone was detected as they wish to deter others following the path.

So if they do deem Content Now to be manipulative and hard to spot then I would expect those caught to get pretty badly spanked and a few big examples made , such as gocompare, if that was the cause of gocompares problems.

Regards point 3, the size of the company and whether they have access to journalists is irrelevant. It happens, and where it does happen it is possible to argue that it’s a form of solicitation.

King

I’ll try not to miss out any points!

1): Article submission :

Mass article submission is something that gives very poor backlinks as the articles are duplicated over many sites, so the majority will be dupe-filtered and will not pass any juice.

Google will no doubt be filtering and devaluing most links from article sites as they aren’t difficult to spot.

As they aren’t truly editorial then Google most likely doesn’t want to pass any value from them.

2: “Third party sites that run the story are under no obligation to provide a backlink.”

If you read content nows FAQ you will see the following:

“If a partner were to simply publish the content without the link and subsequently refused to include the link we would ask them to remove the content as they would not be fulfilling their part of the bargain.”

“Our systems regularly re-check live link partners including content-for-links to ensure that the link has remained in place. We will contact any where this is not the case and ask them to reinstate it.”

taken from http://www.contentnow.co.uk/faq.php

So that answers most of your points

3): PR teams wining and dining Journalists.

Yep, sure this does happen to some degree, and especially with very large companies, however the majority of users of PR sites are small companies who don’t wine and dine, or indeed even know, any of the journalists or bloggers who pick up and run with a story of theirs.

Hope this clarifies

One point I forgot in my previous post:

I don’t believe that you or anyone else at Content Now are deliberately trying to deceive anyone, I think you actually do believe that your service is within Googles TOS and is ethical. I just have a differing opinion as to how Google actually would define a service such as yours.