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.

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.

————

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

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 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.

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 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

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”.

“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!

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.

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

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.

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?

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”.