SEOMOZ can we trust you?

[EmpireSEO]

I was thinking today what are the chances that SEOMOZ can look into my campaigns and see what keywords I am targeting, strategies etc. and then sell that information to others? There has to be some type of clause when you sign up correct? But who knows because I'm not sure. Having Rand and Matt Curts talking via twitter to each other kind of concerns me. Not that I'm worried that Google will know my strategies because we don't do any black-hat linking and anything shady but how much power does SEOMOZ really have and can they leak any information to other companies or Google? Scary stuff that's why I don't put all my eggs into one basket, I spread them out. Thoughts? Thanks in advance - Brett Shaffer

[EmpireSEO]

Thanks Rand for clearing that up for me. Just a paranoid concern of mine but I appreciate you clearly that up and the reassurance of my privacy.

[randfish]

Hi Eric - certainly a fair question.

We don't currently sell or give any information about campaigns to anyone else, and we know how much of a violation of trust and privacy that would be, so we're extremely careful about any way we might use data in the future. As an example of this:

When we do correlation data to test our metrics for Mozscape (PA/DA), we actually run these against a completely unique set from what our members track. Given how big that dataset's getting, it's probably no longer a key piece of anonymization, but when we were smaller, it could have been. We are focused on keeping your data in your hands.

Our revenues, as you can see from my recent post on our investment, come exclusively from PRO memberships (~90%), Mozscape API (~8%) and Mozcon (~2%). We don't do any consulting or any special side deals. We have no interest in getting into other businesses or compromising the trust we've built with our members - YOU are our primary business model and will be for the long term. YOU are how we want to grow to $1billion+ and thus protecting your data and your opinion/trust of us is mission critical to the business.

All that said, there are plans in the future to build some products that may allow our members to opt in to data sharing (e.g. benchmarking types of things or submitting your data for broader scale analysis), but these are merely ideas in our head at this point, and we'd have a careful process so you'd know exactly how your data might be used and could choose whether to participate or not (sort of like how Google Analytics used to offer an opt-in industry comparison service).

Hope this helps, and if you've got specific questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

p.s. oh - and with regards to Google - they've never asked us for data or bought anything from us, but of course, may be getting Mozscape stuff or other data through use of our tools (but only what's available to members, nothing private).

[BenFox]

Generally speaking most of the data SEOMoz has about your campaigns is stuff that a determined competitor could find out anyway (and probably for cheaper than bribing Rand).

Plus if Matt Cutts wanted to get data on you he wouldn't have to go through a 3rd party - he'd just send around a streetview car

[icecarats]

This is a guess on my part, but I imagine this is also one of the reasons why SEOMoz got out of the agency business; kind of hard to avoid conflict of interest when you theoretically could have data on all of your clients' competition at your fingertips. (The other big reason would be concentrating on core competencies)

I guess it's possible they might share some of the info with Distilled but I get the impression that SEOMoz is a pretty pro organization.

[AdamThompson]

I wouldn't worry about it:

1. I trust SEOmoz not to sell the data
2. Any data SEOmoz has on my campaigns pales in comparison to the data Google already has
3. SEOmoz doesn't have any data on my campaigns that could hurt me if Google got it
4. Ethics aside, selling customer campaign data to competitors would be far too risky of a strategy for SEOmoz - news would leak out and that would be the end of SEOmoz

[jgower]

I think they send all of the info they have to Google quarterly so you are talking about maybe 6 months before your competitors actually have a chance to bid.

/sarcasm

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My guess is that you aren't going to find a lot of people paying $99 / mo for the service telling you they are worried all of their secrets are being stolen.  I trust SEOmoz.

Heck, google can probably read your mind, they dont need SEOmoz

an actual answer:

Here's the privacy policy, where SEOmoz says that it can give your information to parties dependent upon certain circumstances (ie. subpoena), but it doesn't say anywhere on _this_page about protecting or _not _disclosing your information that I can see:

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/terms-privacy