SEOMOZ can we trust you?
-
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
-
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.
-
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).
-
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
-
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.
-
I wouldn't worry about it:
- I trust SEOmoz not to sell the data
- Any data SEOmoz has on my campaigns pales in comparison to the data Google already has
- SEOmoz doesn't have any data on my campaigns that could hurt me if Google got it
- 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
-
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
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:
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can check my site
can you please tell me what should I do with this site I trying a lot to solve its issues. the link is here https://alazharquranteaching.com/
Moz Pro | | saharali150 -
SeoMoz Directory List ?? where is it
Hi there i must be missing something,, i have been looking for the list and cant find it ? where do i go to see it ? I am a pro member but all i can find is posts talking about the directory list.. Where is it ?
Moz Pro | | 365ToursSafaris0 -
SEOMoz reports and 404 errors
My SEOMoz report shows a 404 error, found today for this url: http://globalheavyhaul.com/google.com i do not have this anchor text anywhere on my website. How did Roger figure out that somebody looked for that page? Do I need to worry about 404 errors that are the result of user mistakes, instead of actual bad links?
Moz Pro | | FreightBoy0 -
How good is Link Assistant Suite? and how good is the SEOmoz API?
Ive gotten many mixed opinions on Link Assistant and its complete suite, I wanted to get some opinions on the matter.. Anyone use these tools? What is the difference between these tools and other tools on the web? Would adding the free SEOmoz API into this software show better results?
Moz Pro | | SEODinosaur0 -
Software for cheacking SEOmoz parametrs
Could you please tell me the software for checking SEOMoz PA, mR and mT for URL's list?! I would appreciate.
Moz Pro | | meteorr0 -
Difference between Webmaster and SEOMoz back-link stats?
Hi there, I just noticed that there are differences between the links to my site showing on my Google Webmaster account and what is showing on my link analysis on SEOMoz. Has anyone noticed this? In webmaster I am showing 857 links to my site from 92 different domains. In SEOMoz I am showing 816 links to my site from 53 total linking root domains and only 39 followed domains? Does anyone know why this there is a difference? Are the links showing in Webmaster all indexed and followed links? Thanks in advance 🙂 Karl
Moz Pro | | onlineexpression0 -
How does SeoMoz works with noindex meta tags?
In my last SeoMoz Crawl I've found a lot of warnings about duplicated content in page with a noindex meta tag. Is that normal? These pages should not be considered as indexable content of my website, isn't it?
Moz Pro | | jgomes0