It’s interesting that the response/closing rate is so much higher for “no phone” in the “travel” niche while its just about the same for financial. Any idea what the reason for that may be?

I do have a few suggestions though… mostly because I want more of this awesome data!

We’re having a debate going on here about the Tweet section of the infographic. My colleague believes the darkened piece of each pie is the % of prospects that replied before tweeting. I thought it might represent the % of successes… Now neither of us can figure it out!

IMHO, that could use a serious update. As long as we’re at it, we felt the bar graphs would be better with percentages as the primary figure determining height, with the volume figures added on. And we’d also love to see a more thorough breakdown of the best days/times to send emails too.

All in all, still an amazing piece.

This article is not about buying links, it’s about employing off-page SEO strategy when measurement of success is based on the amount invested vs. the number of links gained (whether paid or not). The bottom line is that link volume is not necessarily the core driver of rankings, and if you run a campaign that way you will ultimately drive your strategy value downward. Doing so, will enable you and your vendors to cut corners to meet a “projected” cost to acquire a link. That’s a fundamental flaw and that’s the point of the article.

http://bit.ly/MG0UMq – I mention the case, without naming you, in a podcast that we launched today, because the comments surrounding your de-indexation for these issues created a polarization among SEOs, some defending you, some hating on you.

One of the comments defending what iAcquire had done, was one that said that the Agency should not be penalized for what you had done for your clients.  The client should be de-indexed, not you.  It’s that kind of thinking that is why SEO has such a bad name, and this situation, and y’all getting caught did nothing to help the industry do anything more than maybe cover our asses a little better.

There is a major question that is left unanswered after all of this, and that is whether or not these clients were AWARE of the fact that you and other agencies were buying links for them.  Danny Sullivan had brought that up on the SearchEngineLand posts, that there is a ethical and legal concern where companies may be paying for SEO, but not realizing that what they’re getting is the paid kind, that can have consequences.

I appreciate your reply here Joe, and honestly, your willingness to discuss this and not outright delete my comment (which is what I expected) is surprising.  I will do my part, and I guess it will be up to other SEOs to make up their own minds, but I will try to keep an open mind about this stuff that you guys put out there.

There has been damage done, but everybody makes mistakes.

The true irony for me, at the end of the day, is this post about not buying links, is not going to be indexed by Google, because you got caught buying links.

Thank you for offering up a dialogue on this, I do wish you guys luck, and would love to see Mike succeed, he deserves it.  You certainly have your work cut out for you.

I do worry about the future of SEO agencies, especially when I see:

“In fact, over the next 12-months about 70% of our workforce will work in content strategy, content and creative development, and digital PR and outreach.” 

It reminds me off PR agencies bolting on social media because that was the hot new topic and they were missing out on getting paid for that. I have seen lot’s of SEO agencies now tout their “Content” abilities. But content for what ? Are we talking about content for links ? Content to make sales ? Content for Lead Nurturing ? Content to build your funnel/database ?

The reality is (I think was a really admission in one of your previous posts), that if we are talking about content strategy for link building – it doesn’t cut it in some industries. It’s simply too expensive to produce that much content and hope you get X amount of links. Am I going to dominate markets like “gambling”, “insurance” etc etc with a great content strategy. I dont’ see it. Unnatural links are or some type of paid link strategy (but not as obvious as what you guys did) is always going to have to figure.

Content for links is a really dicey strategy. The core part of that, which might scale is placed content (Guest Posts, Widgets, Infographics, Whitepapers) where you might be able to control the anchor text to some degree. I wonder for how much longer Google will count links in author bio’s equally. Obviously you can integrate links into the content itself, but  with all the SEO agencies moving towards these, normal bloggers will get a bigger opinion of themselves and look for $$ in return.

It’s good that we are all moving towards content, but I can’t help feel there is a lot of bandwagon jumping going on.

This post is definitely a bookmark for me.