Conductor, a New York-based provider of SEO measurement and optimization solutions, has raised a Series B round of funding to the tune of $10 million, led by Matrix Partners and joined by FirstMark Capital, who led the startup’s Series A financing.
Conductor markets technology which aims to empower online marketers and interactive agencies to gather reliable data on their SEO efforts, make better decisions on capturing natural search market share and accurately measure ROI for their employers or clients.
Conductor, which was co-founded by Seth Besmertnik and Jeremy Duboys back in 2005, is playing an interesting field where there’s undoubtedly still quite some room for growth, but it’s up against some stiff competition from other companies (we recently covered funding rounds for Marin Software and Kenshoo, although these focus more on the SEM i.e. paid search part of the business).
The extra funding should give Conductor some more runway to make its services stand out of the crop, and with an experienced management team, which includes former executives from ContextWeb, Apple, Yahoo! and DoubleClick, we consider the company to be a serious contestant in the space.
Interesting announce, thank for the informative post.
Conductor is an album by North Carolina indie rock band The Comas. The album was recorded by Alan Weatherhead at Sound of Music in Richmond, Va. It features Herod on guitars and vocals, Gehweiler also on guitars and vocals, Justin Williams on bass and baritone guitars and Cameron Weeks on drums.
The album is accompanied by a DVD, Conductor: The Movie, which was written and directed by filmmaker/animator Brent Bonacorso. Combining live footage and animation the film stars lead singer Andy Herod and his ex-girlfriend Michelle Williams of Dawson’s Creek fame. It features videos for each song seamlessly blended together.
The DVD also features a new song in the middle called “Bad Connexion”, and as easter egg an alternate version of the movie. It’s about 10 minutes shorter and some of the songs are in a different order. To access it, do the following:
While on the title page of the DVD there are two choices. The first choice, PLAY, is already highlighted. If you go down one you highlight the menu that lets you view each video. Go down one more and nothing should be highlighted. This is where you will find the hidden alternate version of Conductor hit play.
You will know you are looking at the alternate version when the beginning credits end, after the MOON, you see the soldiers running. This is right before “The Science Of Your Mind” starts. In the original version there is no soldiers.
I think some of these SEO companies don’t really make sense. I mean you can optimize up to a point, but google, yahoo, live and others’ ranking are generated by algorithm and linking. You can’t make your results be in the first 10 if it is not linked period.
Yes, I would agree. This seems like another investment bubble. SEO is still quite a shady industry, unfortunately. If you read some of the tactics that SEOs use, you would really be appalled.
well, you can be sure that SEO numerous companies can even fix the link part – easily – it’s not black hat, it’s just business
10$ million…that is a lot of money . use wisely
SEO is a complicated marketing strategy, especially for very large companies with lots of sites and issues. Technology solutions, perhaps like Conductor (never seen their product), that can give marketers lots of data and help them make better decisions & track performance can be very useful if they work.
We have been working with Conductor for some time, and we are very pleased with their service – highly recommended to everyone – cheers to Brandon & his team!
Can I have $10M for feng shui “measurement and optimization solutions”?
time for an acquisition or merger. seo is on its way out. as users become more integrated the use of algore search engines will be over. i notice you didn’t use the term ad network here. innovative next generation ad companies need to have control of there inventory. “natural search industry” is just a cover for “cpc and seo” a saturated played out market. i dominate strategic multichannel natural language location based search technology.
ManagerLocator.com – control yourself
Yes, because spamming your catalog of domains in TC comments is so much more effective than trying to get your site in front of people who are actually looking for what you sell.
So how does this stack up against SEO software like LotusJump?
This is an interesting one… but link building is generally the biggest search engine impact.
I think google smells like a yahoo fart. That’s what happens when I spam comments from my pajamas all day. I wish I could get a job.
Amazing that a company that sells paid links (a practice frowned upon by Google) can raise any capital in this market. A pig with lipstick is still a pig.
This was their name before they changed it to conductor http://www.busi...ies/linkexperts
Well, “frowned upon by Google” is different from “provides significant value to clients”. I imagine VCs care less about the former, and more about the latter. The company bio you link to estimates LinkExpert’s 2008 revenue at $15m… that’s not something to sneeze at.
Google says, “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results….Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results”
They ask Webmasters to report paid links here:
https://www.goo...tools/paidlinks
Google says, “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results….Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results”
They ask Webmasters to report paid links here:
https://www.goo...tools/paidlinks
Google says, “Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.”
And the Adsense TOS says, “AdSense publishers are required to adhere to the webmaster quality guidelines.” And then says, “Google reserves the right to withhold payment or charge back Your account due to…any breach of this Agreement by You, pending Google’s reasonable investigation…”
So theoretically, if Google finds a paid link that violates the webmaster quality guidelines, and the buyer is an Adsense publisher, Google could impair the PageRank passed by the link AND terminate the buyer’s Adsense account.
This coming from a Conductor employee…Rich…
http://www.link...om/in/anfedorov
The question on everyone’s mind is whether Conductor is in an arms race with Google. It’s a bad business model to build your value proposition on the back of another company and at the same time spit in that company’s face.
Is that not what you’re doing Audrey? You’ve built a system which essentially games another. It’s just not sustainable.
If we’re delving into ad hominem attacks, let’s also point out Scott Draves, a Google employee, sells paid links on his side project’s website:
http://electricsheep.org/ (check right underneath “Sponsored Messages”)
While I agree that paid links corrupt rankings to some degree, it doesn’t seem extensive enough for Google to really care about.
Why does TechCrunch continue to group SEO with SEM. That is like saying Text Advertising is the same as Display Advertising;
but it’s up against some stiff competition from other companies (we recently covered funding rounds for Marin Software and Kenshoo, although these focus more on the SEM i.e. paid search part of the business).
Conductor does not compete in any way with Marin or Kenshoo – get it right for once.
Interesting even SEO based companies are getting funds.
Nandini, would you like to provide some examples of the work that Conductor has done for you?
… so Google can remove you from their index immediately.
Matt-
The website Nadini owns is BornRich.org.
LinkExperts links are very easy to identify I can spot almost all of their clients with ease.
The sites I have seen seem to be generating results for their clients – which is all that matters. I couldn’t spot any spammy links on BornRich.org.
It’s also worth noting that a new service called ScoutMetrics is, from what I can tell, a head-on competitor to conductor. Their service allows you to basically peer into your competitors’ analytics data and then devise strategies on how to better compete for the natural search terms.
We have been using Conductor for several years and are extremely happy with them. They have some high profile clients including Forbes.com and others. The advertisers that use them are quality and include HP, Bose, BestBuy and other name brands.
It’s a shame that Google would penalize a site for using them when Google AdSense is essentially the same thing.
Yes but Google it not getting paid if you through a 3rd party so that why they call it a scam.
SEO is a racket. As some have pointed out here, there are a few concrete things you can and should do to optimize your site and/or ad campaign to increase traffic, most notably producing interesting content that is marked up well. But beyond those few things, which don’t take much to learn, everything else is ephemeral at best.
Totally depends on the market. If you’re in a boring industry where nobody produces interesting content and buries it in some weird code, or in a market where people have ignored search for a while and dump all of their content into frames or some late 90s flash production, properly marked up content can be enough. To compete against sites that also produce interesting content (not buried in some ancient CMS) often requires more. It’s not rocket science, but it’s not snake oil either
conductor.com may be worth 1 billion dollars…cuz Google is worth 150 billion and web 2.0 no bubble. huge growth & potential. Keep buying stocks http://iamned.com/blog/ no recession no doom and gloom.
Hey TechCrunch writers,
You keep mixing up SEO and SEM.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) = manipulating a website and external links to get higher rankings on Google’s NATURAL/ALGO results in order to get more FREE traffic for a set of search terms.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) = Paid Search = Sponsored Search (Yahoo terminology) = PPC Advertising = Using an advertising platform such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to show TEXT ADS at the top and on the right side of search result pages to drive PAID traffic to one’s website (paying for clicks only, not impressions).
You’re welcome.
The way to success: Measurement. Measurement. Measurement. On the right track to make better decisions. Track performance is very useful.
$10mil that is a lot of money in this current environment, i wonder how much turnover they must plan to have and how many clients they have to repay this amount.
Some of the bigger independant players in the space arent even worth that much…
According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
(a) “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
(b) “Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.”
For More Information: http://www.goog...mp;answer=35769
Reviewing their site indicates that they do in fact offer link building services though I’d say it raises concern with verbiage like “every link in our premium network…” – the last thing you want is to be linked to from any type of “network”.
That may just be poor use of wording on their part, but the fact is that link building should be done strategically, should be one-off—meaning individual websites are approached about good link fits on a page by page basis where relevancy to the visitor is the focus, and if you want a competitive barrier to entry it should not be easy to replicate. Typically, anything that involves a network or a publicly accessible channel for link building is NOT difficult for a competitor to replicate. Something that takes lots and lots of time, requires relationship building and rapport building is going to be much harder for competitors to track and duplicate.
Nice looking site though
Does anyone have examples of the links Conductor places? Someone mentioned Forbes.com and I found some links at the bottom of each page (the ‘resources’ box at the bottom of http://www.forb.../entrepreneurs/ for example). Are these links from Conductor? Or am I missing something?
Has anyone used the beta of their analytics platform? Feedback? Good? Bad?
We are under an NDA but I’ve seen their platform is it’s one of the most impressive advancements I’ve seen in the SEO industry in years. Matrix Partners is a top 10 VC in the US (highest yielding fund of all time) , and I am sure they did their homework.
Those links look pretty relevant to me. These guys are the only reputable link company we’ve ever met. They have guidelines that they enforce and will turn away $$$$ to maintain the integrity of what they do – we we’re rejected because our site is a shopping comparison engine and they do not work with aggregators for link building.
@ Barry Levine
Hope so… that would be soooo under the radar.
I just goes to show you that what Google and Matt Cutts says isn’t true in practice. Here is how I see it:
1. Matt Cutts and Google say that if you buy or sell links, bad things will happen to you. They’re not specific about said bad things, but most think penalties in terms of rankings or loss of pagerank.
2. Conductor would only be successful if their links generated results for their clients.
3. Sane people would only invest $10m into organizations with successful clients.
So it’s clear that there is something missing. A $10m investment into a company that is clearly against Google’s TOS is a sign that the Google TOS doesn’t matter and you need not pay attention to it to be successful.
I and many webmasters have stayed away from paid links in the past because we didn’t want to get slapped. Now it looks like we made the wrong decision. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t I guess.
Maybe Conductor should release a report about their client successes so we can better understand all of this. Do they just do network links or do they help with link baiting and social media as well? Maybe that is how they stay clear of the guidelines…
Barry, you might be surprised at what people fund, at least in the short term. For example, several years ago, I saw a spammy SEO firm purchased for $90+ million dollars. The parent company had massive layoffs not long afterwards and I believe the valuation of the parent company soon ended up below the purchase price of the SEO firm. I don’t even see the stock ticker for the parent company anymore.
The point I was trying to make was that spam works. I was looking through Forbes and where those folks were ranking – and it looked like the links work.
Someone else made a comment that you couldn’t just bounce a company like Intuit out of the index for buying links – and I agree with that – your first priority has to be your users.
My personal problem from all of this is I look like an idiot to my clients that I told NOT to buy links through companies like Conductor.
Has your stance changed? If a link is relevant and valuable to the users of the page, but it is paid for, does that still constitute a violation of the Google guidelines? What is your take on http://www.cond...deal-v-reality?
Does Conductor truly combat ‘search spam’ and allow industry leading brands to rank for the terms which they should? Or is their garbage just less stinkier than others?
Hi Barry, Google’s stance has not changed. It’s the same stance as I made clear back when Conductor was called LinkExperts: http://www.busi...96c7a7c00d4d4b3
Matt-
I guess what you need to do is close the gap between what you say and what you do.
I’ve seen companies big and small jump to the top of results using Conductor. And then I have to justify why I don’t suggest going that route. Google has been saying forever that it’s not a sustainable strategy, etc…but these guys have been in business a long time…
You guys are turning into the United Nations. Violate your terms of service and watch out – oh wait – nothing happens
I think there is a lot more behind the scenes at Conductor. I was looking through the bios of their employees on LinkedIn and they have some amazing people working them – including folks from the engines. This board sounds like a bunch of competitors trying to throw stones – has anyone even seen their platform product? I have not, but have heard from a friend at fortune 50 company that it’s game changing for enteprise marketers who take search seriously. If I was at Google, there seems to be much bigger fish to fry – these guys seem like they are trying to add value. I submitted a link rfp to them and it was reject because my site is a lead generation site – they did not care i was “willing to spend 10k a month”. In these markets, even the biggest seo/sem shops are working with the spamiest of companies – appartently not these guys.
Our site was rejected to for not providing enough user value. Apparently, they will not work with affiliate sites. I signed up for the beta although the site says it’s full – we’ll see what happens.
Yahoo seems to have a different view on the issue, but may be taking a similar algorithmic approach.
From an interview with Priyank Garg from last year:
“Eric Enge: Right. Yes, indeed. So, what about just paid links in general? What’s your policy on that?
Priyank Garg: There’s no black and white policy that makes sense in our mind for paid links. The principle remains value to the users. If a paid link is not valuable to the users, we will not want to give it value. Our algorithms are being organized for detecting value to users. We feel most of the time that paid links are less valuable to users than organic links.
But that’s not black and white, it is always a continuum. Yahoo! continues to focus on the element of recognizing links that are valuable to users, building mechanisms in our algorithms that attenuate the signal and capture as much value from that link in context, rather than worrying about it being paid or unpaid. As I said before, paid links are found to be generally less useful to users. That’s how we try to capture that aspect of it.”
http://www.ston...yank-garg.shtml
@ Barry
Can’t just go banning intuit.com now could we? In all seriousness though, it’s a tough position for Google to be in. They are trying to algorithmically combat this so that it just doesn’t work rather than penalizing or banning sites based on the presence of paid links pointing to their site because of the old standby “well, what if our competitor did that just to report us?”.
What they can do is strip the PageRank from sites selling the links which in my mind is a way of putting a scarlet letter on known link selling offenders. If they do this at least it startles everyone. As much as toolbar PR doesn’t matter you’d be surprised at how many people notice when it gets white-barred.
At the end of the day though, I think Google probably realizes that anything they do causes some sort of uproar, probably elevates the amount of related customer support contacts they get and have to deal with or ignore and face further uproar… and so at the end of they day they probably just turn back to plugging away at finding some way to do better at detecting this stuff.
I still see the worst, most irrelevant, clump of sidebar and footer links working like a charm in some industries and it’s pretty sad because the newcomers see that and replicate it and the problem just perpetuates. The key factor for businesses that are engaged in this is that hopefully they know the risk, and while it can be highly effective, at any point in time their rankings could be demolished and if that is their corporate site or brand they’ve invested in it can be really painful (grown men crying type painful).
Great discussion here. I’m enjoying Barry Levine’s and Jeff Smith’s comments the most here. Conductor certainly is an interesting case and I’m looking forward to seeing how their strategy holds up over time.
As the snippets from the interview with Priyank Garg convey above, there is certainly a large spectrum of paid links. I’ve not bothered to analyze any of their clients but based on the forbes.com example the link placements appear to be on the very best part of that range and frankly I’ve seen those on the polar opposite still working… so, it’s likely quite effective and consistently so.
The fact that the links on that page are definitely geared towards entrepreneurs is solid and you could view them through a paradigm of being behaviorally targeted perhaps
. However, the problem for a search engine just becomes that monkey see, monkey do and most monkeys that see that wouldn’t go out and find as user-targeted of placements.
At the end of the day, I’d imagine their investors will do very well. It is certainly a lot easier convincing an exec at a Fortune 500 that shiny links on Forbes.com are the new black than it is to convince them to develop badass content and do ten other foreign sounding “strategic initiatives” to “rank higher”.
From the website:
“In 2003, Besmertnik successfully founded health portal MindMD.com, where he learned and developed the innovative search practices that later became the foundation of Conductor’s marketing solutions.”
MindMD doesn’t even exist. LOL. Some “foundation.”
Jeremy Duboys, founder of Professional Taste Printing, is the cofounder. Look at the site – just a scrappy affiliate looking to make a buck. Check out the footer links – other affiliate sites. Does Jeremy Duboys, President of Conductor, operate a link farm?
What makes anyone think these two are out for anything more than spamming the web and making a buck off it? If they want to respond to these accusations, so be it. I’d be interested in hearing what they have to say!
I’m not sure a site that doesn’t exist today and an affiliate site with links in the footer brand the founders as spammers. Lots of once successful sites no longer exist. Lots of sites have LOTS of links, that aren’t even relevant in their footers (ahem http://www.ticketmaster.com/) so that’s a little far reaching of a statement.
I can’t speak for Matt Cutts but I don’t necessarily think Google equates a company brokering text links on top tier publishing websites and who (from what I can see and have heard) only accepts as advertisers/clients large and reputable companies with being spammers. It’s clear they don’t like it, it violates their guidelines, and does leave all parties susceptible to penalization of a number of varieties but I don’t think it qualifies as being “spam”.
These guys are obviously not spammers:
1. Matrix Partners is one of the most reputable VCs in the world; they have been around for decades and invested in amazing entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs
2. Pequot Ventures/FirstMark Capital (same firm) falls into the same boat.
3. Seth Besmertnik was selected a finalist Ernst and Young’s entrepreneur of the year – the most prestigious entrepreneurship award which does not go to spammers: http://finance....26605.html?.v=1
All of these firms do extensive Due Diligence. This is where they talk with everyone in the industry, do background checks, call dozens of customers, talk with employees, they do everything; anyone who has been through VC due diligence knows how extensive this is.
According to Conductor, affiliates are spammers. I’m just using their own terminology.
I think Conductor only accepting clients with deep pockets just underscores the need for Google to pownce on them. Why is it fair that search results are determined by those who can spend the most?
And yeah – these are REAL relevant:
http://www.over...intheoffice.com
LOL
Our site previously sold links through LinkExperts until our PageRank was penalized. While we immediately took down the links, we never regained our original PageRank score, so it’s impossible to say it was because of the links.
While PageRank doesn’t matter and our traffic/rankings/ad metrics went unchanged, it was difficult for our sales department to convey the quality of our site with a PageRank 4 versus our previous 7.
When we announced our decision to LinkExperts to cut the links they were very upset and pulled out every stop to keep us. I think even the CEO was on the conference call. While they’re nice people, our management decided it wasn’t worth the risk for what was only a very small revenue stream compared to our performance-based advertising we sell on the site (both direct and through a few networks, including AdSense).
On a different topic, we’re very interested in their platform product. We have unique challenges as a large content site and am very interested in hearing more. Hopefully they package it in such a way that we can use the platform without selling links.
I’ve been contacted by these guys a few times for two sites our company manages. It seems like there is a lot of upside to working with them (and the downside is just having the stomach to read Matt Cutts’ banter). The only thing holding me back right now is that they’re EXTREMELY expensive – but if they generate results, the investment makes sense.
I personally think Matt Cutts and Google need to either back their talk up with action or quiet down altogether. Right now they look like idiots.
Seems like a lot of anonymoust people (or maybe one person with a different name) is trying to stir Matt Cutts up – most likely a competitor. Ironic part is the real spammers who hang below the radar are likely the same people.
I think this is a good response that Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor, wrote awhile ago. Original post is at http://www.busi...ies/linkexperts
————
We’re thrilled to be a part of the SAI World’s Most Valuable Digital Startups – and want to thank the staff at Silicon Alley Insider who worked so diligently to compile this directory. It’s an honor to be included, and a testament to the hard work of the LinkExperts family.
We’d also like to briefly talk about your statement of “paid links, it seems to us, are paid links.”
The major search engines have all made a point of combating ‘link spam’ – unnatural manipulation of the engine results – and we support those efforts unequivocally. If you dig a bit deeper, however, they’re really talking about paid forms of link spam, which we steer 100% away from at LinkExperts.
Spam puts no priority on individual users – instead, it attempts to trick or deceive them (think of your typical email spammers). There are numerous ways for these nefarious operators to hijack a searcher and deposit them on a ‘made for ads’ or affiliate page – and these sites continue to push legitimate providers of products and services to the second page and beyond.
LinkExperts was founded with the mission to help Fortune 1000 companies who have surprisingly low search visibility compete against that spam, and focus their already established high levels of authority within their site.
We’ve established the industry’s most aggressive quality program. We have a dedicated staff that spends their days rejecting publishers and advertisers from our community – leaving significant revenue behind – because the resulting improvement in rank would not benefit the searcher. We’d never place a link on a publisher’s page that was not pointed to a high-quality, well-respected website, useful to the publisher’s readers, and highly relevant to the publisher’s content. We refuse to work with affiliates or lead generators. We inspect every link by hand across a variety of quality control points, ensuring that we’re only placing the best links possible.
The results? Searchers have a more direct path to their desired destination, and a better user experience – a hugely important distinction for the search engines.
We truly believe what we’re doing helps contribute to a more structured Internet and thus more relevant search results.
Once again, we thank SAI for the distinction,
Seth Besmertnik
CEO, LinkExperts
Look, Conductor is kicking butt and taking names. They are of course trying to stay within the guidelines set by others. That said, they know what works, and they know how to do what is in the best interest of their customers.
PR agencies influence newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets to report favorable news and information about their clients.
Media conglomerates have reporting and ethics standards too, but that doesn’t mean that successful PR firms don’t bend the boundaries a little. IPG and WPP are massive firms with 25,000+ employees – they have huge subsidiaries that do nothing but public relations.
It’s a competitive landscape out there. If you want to benefit from natural search then you need to know your stuff and play the game.
Conductor, like many others, is doing everything they can to play nice with the search engines. They have one of the most credible link footprints in the SEO agency world. $
10mm is a lot of money in this climate, but it’s still a relatively small investment in the overall scheme. Matrix knows what they are getting into. Conductor has an opportunity to make a big impact in the space. The “SEO is dirty and evil” rhetoric is getting old.
$10, million, how do they intend to devise who gets what, seo is bad enough at times, and now some seo company gets $10 million and help other companies, l smell a rat.