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
-
What user agent is used by SEOMOZ crawler?
We have a pretty tight robots.txt file in place to only allow the major search engines. I do not want to block SEOMOZ.ORG from being able to crawl the site so I want to make sure the user agent is open.
Moz Pro | | eseider0 -
How can authority of the page be higher then authority of the domain?
In the opensite explorer most of the links that I see have a higher domain authority and lower page authority which makes sense to me because I thought that domain authority is an aggregate of its pages authority. But apperently I was wrong because sometimes I see that the page authority is greater then its domain? How could that be?
Moz Pro | | SirMax0 -
For SEOMoz Staff - Can You Make a Better Referral Badge, PLEASE?
I am going to send referrals to SEOMOZ and I want to put a badge on my site with my referral link from this page: http://www.seomoz.org/users/referrals Can you make some banners where we can just select an image src with a call to action like "FREE SEO Tools" and "Free 30 Day Trail"? Currently the only badges I see say something wack like "I Love SEOMOZ" http://www.seomoz.org/dp/badges I need something that converts higher than "I love SEOmoz". Love yah guys!
Moz Pro | | Francisco_Meza0 -
Duplicate page error from SEOmoz
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. I'm trying to use a rel=canonical but maybe I'm not doing it right. This page is the original, definitive version of the content: https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/sent-2011-10-01 This page is an alias that points to it (each month the alias is changed to point to the then current issue): https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/latest-issue The alias page above contains this tag (which is also updated each month when a new issue comes out) in the section: Is that not correct? Is the https (vs http) messing something up? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | scanlin0 -
How can I get ranking keys of competitors
Sometimes it might be clever to analyse the stategy of a competitor to see with which keys they rank successfully. For example I have a webshop, so I type in amazon.com and seomoz spits out: books, dvds, ... I can now see with what keys i wont have a chance and can think of missing keys where my chance might be. Is there a possibility to find out with seomoz?
Moz Pro | | SEOBavaria820 -
SEOMoz PR vs. Google PR
I have the SEO MozBar set up and for one of the sites we are maintaining, it is showing them on a 59 as PA in the MozBar. When I check it on Google PR, it has either no info or a 0. http://www.prchecker.info was one of the ones I found which shows them as 0. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | Champions0 -
Can you release some sample documents for the budding SEO practitionar?
Hey guys, Would it be possible for you to release some sample documents, e.g. an 'initial proposal' example that can help us newbies when aiming to obtain prospective clients. I must admit I am much much more technical minded than articulate when it comes to these matters so a sample report would benefit me dearly that I could use as a starting point. My SEO services so far have been well.. totally free so far whilst I learn more about the techniques involved and determine whether it really is work I'd like to carry out in addition to my day to day development/design tasks. Now I am faced with a potential new client and after spending a fair number of hours Googling, I'm still not 100% sure how to structure the document and whether an initial audit should be carried out first to give me some statistics for the report.. Or whether the report should simply outline what I can offer. The samples I've found online, most of which are quite old, mostly tend to come from established SEO companies and have a corporate feel about them which doesn't reflect on myself as a single consultant. So if you could help out that would be fantastic and I'm sure would be a popular resource for others just starting out in the field. Thank you Dave
Moz Pro | | davebrown19750 -
SEOMoz site crawlers created an issue for our servers
I have set up a number of campaigns with your pro tool. Unfortunately we have 7 sites on our server and our IT dept have said that we had an issue when your site crawlers visited for several sites at the same time - is there any way that I can retain the campaigns but have the sites crawled on request rather than automatically?
Moz Pro | | StephenALee0