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Todd Malicoat Interview
Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl is no doubt a likeable guy, when he gave news that he was leaving Jim Boykin’s SEO Company to peruse other avenues even Matt Cutts from Google wished him well. So what is Todd most well known for? When thinking of this interview (and choice of conversation) it was clear, Todd is (please excuse or do not excuse the expression) an expert on link building even though he is off looking for greener pastures today. Let’s have a chat with Todd and see if we can get some good data for our own projects.
Todd, thank you for linking to my blog back in a time when I was not even on the radar, I appreciate and will always remember those who support what I do for free.
You earned it man. I think you filled a very valuable niche in SEM that no one had hit hard on yet, and it turned into some great content.
I get requests for links pretty often, but the best thing people can possibly do is find something that has been untapped and focus on it, and I think your interviews are a great example of that. There’s a lot to be said for doing one thing great, versus trying to do too many things just to do them.
Choosing something very specific to be GREAT at can really improve your visibility online, I’m definitely glad to return the favor after there were plenty of great SEM folks who helped to do it for me.
What was it you used to do for Jim Boykin and what is it you are doing today?
Jim brought me in mainly to do sales and consulting for WeBuildPages (WBP). I had actually done some sales in a previous job with SAMSA while creating their SEO service offering, mainly because no one else understood what the heck it was I was doing. I was lucky at WBP to be able to sell a product I believed in, and work with a team I really got along well with. At a certain point, however, there are issues with growth and I ended up doing mainly strategic consulting and not a lot of overseeing of fulfillment. I decided I could really do the consulting side of things on my own until I decided what I’d like to do next. I’m still determining what will be next, and have some incredible (and overwhelming offers). I’m not quite ready to jump at something yet, and prioritizing other areas of my life in the meantime.
I’ve mainly been doing strategic consulting, project management, and SEO training for a select group of clients. It’s been very nice to work with clients that I enjoy and maintain flexibility of when I work. I’ve also been working on developing a few of my own quality sites, overlooking the project management of them like I have done for my clients for a long time now. At somepoint, I started to get pigeonholed into being the “link building guy” which is what I often talk about. It definitely isn’t a bad thing to be associated with strong link development strategy, but it is only a piece (although online a substantial piece) of my bigger passion of business development (specifically online marketing strategy development).
Let’s talk about a recent comment you made on Threadwatch in that “5 Billion Pages Indexed in Less Than 30 Days” thread. You said :
G got away from this and tried outsmarting webmasters and seo’s at some point. You can fool most people most of the time, but you won’t fool ALLthe people all the time. What data do you believe we should have accurate access too?
Do you see any harm in people who are very good at gaming the system having this same access?
I’ve been really frustrated with Google lately. I don’t even LIKE Google bashing, but some of the decisions in the last year and a half or more have just been so against the things that made them great to begin with. I first brought up the subject of trying to dupe SEO’s about a year ago. It may have been unintentional, but G used to be very open with the data that they shared. I think that was one of the things that made them great. Sure, keeping that data open created problems, but when you are honest with people you are going to have everyone on your side. When you start looking at people with slanted eyes, then they are going to start looking at you the same way. Folks like me quickly become jaded. They are doing some really nice things with sitemaps, but I already feel like they have an ulterior motive of US helping them more with sitemaps than they are helping us. It might be that I’m already too jaded though. I would also like to say that all of the people that I’ve ever met from Google were awesome (one of the reasons I feel kinda bad bashin’ ‘em all the time). They are dedicated, and hard working, and really WANT to help. I just think the corporation is bigger than the individuals sometimes. Since they often get picked on by name (and shouldn’t), Matt, Adam, Aaron, Brian, and many others do a fantastic job in improving my (and others) view of Google all the time with their work to improve communications and relations. They know I nitpick at their work, but I hope they also know I’m aware of the 99% of stuff they’ve done that is pretty fantastic, and that I’m glad they listen to constructive criticism and don’t get too pissed at me, because I really do have a high level of respect for what they do.
I think at some point, G started viewing SEO’s as the complete enemy. It may have started earlier, but when I really noticed it was with the debate over paid links. Paid links were a direct threat to the G algorithm. They combated paid links by serving bogus information from the toolbar (IE a site could show PR7 and pass no juice). To me, it is a total BS move. The really smart blackhat folks that they are trying to combat are not going to fall for it, but the mom and pops that they generally try to protect might. One day I should build a list of the other information that I think is kind of bogus from G, but I hate sounding like a tin-foil hat Googlewatch kind of nutjob. I LIKE Google, and I think there are some amazingly smart people working there. I just wish they’d go back to their hippy sandal wearing days, take off their suits and let their hair grow again instead of being so concerned with gobbling up user data and inflating their already insane stock price.
If there’s anyone from G reading this, Please heed this really amazing quote from the Cluetrain manifesto
Controlling information is like trying to control a conversation: it can’t be done and still be genuine.
The media coverage of G was bound to go downhill after the IPO pinnacle, and it is STILL going to go down no matter how hard you try at some point. The less you try to CONTROL information and conversations, the better chances you have that there will be positive outcomes. Information wants to be free. SEO’s WILL figure out which links count, and what is broken with your engine; it is only a matter of time. The end data result HAS to be public. You can obfuscate the information and piss people off by trying to bullshit them, or you can work to open the information up and keep people on your side. It’s a tough thing to do, and to be fair it’s where MOST big businesses fail. It is just more of a shame to see, because Google started with cluetrain roots and has moved more to the corporate side of things in my opinion.
To answer the original question, the example I use often is Yahoo’s willingness to offer up the site explorer tool. It gives very accurate results about backlinks and pages indexed. These are two very important factors to SEO folks. I really don’t think that it has hurt their relevancy in any way, and at least with myself has earned some goodwill. That is information that is important to me to make decisions, and it was probably a pretty easy thing for them to do. There is certainly potential for abuse with any information, but by earning the goodwill they are much more likely to get unsolicited feedback to create a better product. Currently I would be much more likely to offer feedback to Yahoo rather than Google because they are assisting me in a way that doesn’t make me paranoid (like google sitemaps; which is a whole other ball of tinfoil)
I would like to see Google reintroduce tools that did not require logins that were accurate. Graywolf has an excellent critique of Google sitemaps. Sitemaps certainly has potential, but I’m not really a fan of having to make ALL my sites known in one place for limited benefit. As I said, it feels like I’m helping them more than they’re helping me. A really good start would be improving the accuracy of the site and link commands wherethey produced something that was actually worthwhile to users. Something like yahoo’s linkdomain command would be nice as well. There are many areas that they could improve information transparency without creating significant detriment to relevancy. It’sa shame they are currently trying to control the information and conversations, and sacrificing goodwill for confusing spammers in the short term. All SEO’s are really not the enemy. When they intentionally provide misinformation it just pisses people off and creates ill will and makes SEO’s and webmasters REALIZE that they are indeed viewed as the enemy. It doesn’t have to be an information arms race.
Let’s talk about paid links, I have someone who kindly linked one of my blogs from his high PR website, the only problem was he put my link right between what appears to be paid or sponsored links. It really sucks because I do not do any link building for this site and could use some PR, is there a way to determine if a link that exists within a paid co-citation area does not pass favor? Would it be fair for me to lose this favor that was obviously voluntary and a very nice gesture? Or is this just another example of guilt by association resulting in lame collateral damage?
I think paid linking is probably the biggest area of misinformation in the world of SEO right now. Every person who practices link development is paranoid of being penalized for purchasing link juice. I think telling people not to buy links bought the engineers some time to fix the dependency on linking in the algorithm, but it was at the expense of the trust of webmasters. Buying links is another form of advertising. The trouble is that it feels wrong from an editorial standpoint. Folks at Google feel like it is stuffing the ballot box. Realistically, it’s more like political lobbying. You are paying for some influence. To think that money can’t purchase influence is extremely naive in my opinion. The value of top rankings is just too substantial. With so much dependence on links in the algorithm it was bound to happen. I just don’t think fighting the flaw with misinformation is a good tactic, and manually devaluing links is certainly not a scaleable solution. FUD is not the answer.
Sponsorship of websites, and buying links for click through traffic IS a natural link. I was really impressed with Bill Slawski’s quote “the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.” From your last interview. I think it is arrogant of google to try to control how people allocate links (implementing nofollow being another example of this);after they have suggested new rules for the web with the ways they rank documents. What is even more frustrating, is that now they’ve decided to disobey robots standards, and are so concerned with cloaking and spam detection (using multiple bots) and other issues that they are willing to not play by the rules everyone else has agreed to follow.
In regards to you receiving co-citation from a “paid link neighborhood” I wouldn’t worry about it a bit. I really think the best they can do is to identify areas of a site that are paid placement and discount them from passing any juice. You may not get any boost from the link, but I highly doubt that Google would be silly enough to start algorithmically demoting sites that were buying links. Manual reviews may be a different story, but I would doubt a small percentage of paid links are going to do harm even with a manual site review.
With the popularity of Jim Westegren’s link building thread SEO’s appear to still be extremely focused on links, could this actually be like going down with a sinking ship or is link building still working like a charm?
Link building is probably going to be important for quite a while. However, the forms of link building have already evolved heavily in the last few years. There are so many different TYPES of links that it is important to have a varied “natural” mix. I’ve talked a lot about balancing the link equation, which I think is very similar to the concepts that Jim discusses. His guide is fantastic as it gets across the point that there is a need for many different types of links, and they all serve somewhat different purposes while working towards the common goal of increased traffic.
Link building is a lot like grass roots marketing. Asking a mom and pop site to put up a link is the equivalent of asking a small business owner to put up a sign in his or her storefront. Asking an article site to publish your article with a link is similar to submitting a story to a newspaper or magazine. It’s really just another form of marketing. The automated button pusher stuff will continue to work with diminishing levels of success like it always has, but when it’s gone, link building will be very much like grass roots marketing.
Link building is probably the most important element of SEO that no one wants to deal with. It’s not really fun unless you are the one reaping the incredible results, and even then it kind of sucks. It’s tedious, but it’s so extremely important. Many companies outsource their link development or focus their efforts in the wrong areas. Every SEO should be required to do some link building as a prerequisite to doing strategy and development. It gives a fundamental understanding of the critical importance of links, and makes you “think links” with your other decisions. If ad agencies ever get the linking thinking, the game is probably going to shift quickly.
Define “natural” links and ways to encourage others to link without reciprocating.
I think the term “natural” link building has really been used and abused. The original idea of a natural link was I believe, to attract a link without having to ask for it. I suppose this still holds true, and we’ve renamed it to an extent “link-baiting” I’ve found that many SEO’s (myself included) are always thinking about links. With such a high indirect ROI it’s a great way to think. There’s really only one way, however, to “naturally” attract links. Great content. This horse has been beaten to death, so I’ll leave that for the vehement white hat crowd, and point everyone to the brilliant hooks of linkbaiting (http://performancing.com/node/38).
Let me mention a personal belief and see if you agree, say I sell a product and my competitors are ruling the serps with a small number of incoming links. If I have the same links to my site and even better content it will still take an extremely long time to get the same results in Google. I believe that this is the way they keep marketers (who are looking for quick results) at bay, a kind of SEO proof serp, agree?
Firstly, the idea of “link trumping” by volume USED to be correct. It still is to some extent, but unfortunately now, there is so much more that goes into it. With age and trust being such heavy factors, sometimes you don’t need as many links, and some times you may need a whole lot more. There’s just a lot more variables in the equation that hold a whole lot of weight to balance the algo that used to be heavily biased towards ONLY links.
There definitely IS a sandbox, you can argue the semantics, but that is the name that a majority of SEO folks gave the algorithm changes that folks were trying to identify. In hindsight, I like to refer to it as the trustbox, because in my opinion, most all of the algo filters originally called the sandbox are based around establishing trust. It is frustrating to new webmasters trying to make their sites rank high, because new sites are essentially guilty until proven innocent.
While most SEO’s bitch and complain about the trustbox, I think it definitely improves relevancy. I’m not saying that I LIKE having to figure out more complex filters, only that in a high percentage of instances, an old site is likely to be of higher quality than a new site. It is just good use of probability. Of course, with the filtering changes, Google will again change the face of the web as we’ve seen large established brands essentially putting up spammy doorway pages because they can rank so well so quickly, and the repercussions are quite low.
I agree with your SEO proof concept, and I refer to it as quality validation. For instance, if a fantastic new site like Rand and Kat’s Web 2.0 Awards site is launched, you don’t want to keep it in the trustbox forever. I would be willing to bet that user data (toolbar, desktop search, firefox, etc.) are being used to validate the links that the site picks up. Just like link popularity, quality can be faked for a little while. That’s why there’s the need for quality validation. When the user data (whichever criteria are used) validates that the site is, in fact, a quality site, it is given a reprieve from the trustbox. The idea of quality validation is based loosely around the ideas of quality indicators being used. A quality indicator such as user volume or time on site could certainly be used to validate immense link growth within a given timeframe. There are probably plenty of other correlations that could be made with a large enough data set. Michael Gray (aka Graywolf) and I discussed this idea of quality validators and the use of clickstream data extensively with Greg Niland (GoodROI) on GoodKarma if people would like to hear more on the subject.
Why is it that sites take so long to be found for their actual names? Example: The name of my new blog is “internet marketing guide” and there appears to be 131k results for that exact phrase in Google, how long and what do you believe it will take to actually be found for that phrase?
This is one of the collateral damage elements of the trustbox filters in my opinion. With any changes to the algo, there are always going to be unexpected exceptions, and collateral damage to sites that probably SHOULD rank for certain phrases. In fact, one of the things I think is valuable to my clients, is trying to stay a step ahead of what is priority to the search engines to make sure that they don’t become collateral damage when new filters (like the impending subdomain filters) get implemented. Subdomain spam is currently a problem – filters are bound to happen. Do the math. Don’t be a statistic, and then come crying to me.
The same quality validators apply to your own name. An interesting side note, however, is that it seems they loosen up the filters a bit for domain/ site names. This really brings keyword domains back into vogue in my opinion. Keyword domains don’t rank right away for their names, but they do seem to rank much faster from what I’ve seen. The loosening of the quality filters has also made keyword domains much more effective (albeit for only a single phrase most times). Every time a door is closed, there is a window that opens. As far as time, that’s never an answer I like to give because so much can change in 3 months. I’ll say two years, and then you’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s sooner
I also noticed when I changed the name of a blog after 6 months it put the name in some sort of sandbox, or is it simply that I need incoming links for the new name? (Note: For Wordpress blogs the site name is a sitewide link by default which uses an h1 tag)
I’d probably want to know a little bit more of the history of the site before giving too much of an answer. Google’s algo is so much more complex than people often give it credit for. It’s nearly impossible, in my opinion, to isolate variables and have the data be worth very much for an extensive period of time. The best bet for nearly any site is to establish a strategy of best practices, like Andy Hagans has done with his definitive guide to the sandbox. SEO is similar to investing. You really have to use the best practices and hedge your bets in case something goes strange (because it often does).
I will stop this interview here; those questions should draw some interesting answers from the guy who knows his stuff, thanks for stopping in Todd!
Thanks for the great questions Aaron. Keep up the interesting interviews. Cheers to high rankings!
Bio: Todd Malicoat has been creating websites since 1997, and started doing SEO and Internet marketing in early 2001. He is a moderator at the World’s largest webmaster forum Webmasterworld.com, and maintains an Internet consulting journal at www.stuntdubl.com. Todd has recently been a speaker on topics such at both Search Engine Strategies and Webmaster World’s world of search conferences on link development and search engine marketing. For more bio information, please see his about page.
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June 26th, 2006 at 4:19 am
That’s one of your best interviews, Aaron. Thanks to you and to Todd. There’s a great deal of meat there.
I particularly like the big picture view of Google that Todd is giving. I believe a lot in the product-driven/customer-centric grouping of companies. Customer-centric means finding out what customers need and delivering those needs. Microsoft under Bill Gates has been product-driven IMHO. They do it very well but it’s what they think I need rather than what I may really need. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft changes under the Ray Ozzie influence.
To my mind Google is very much towards the product-driven end of the scale. When they move to the right, then they will be more successful and we’ll all be a lot happier.
June 26th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Killer interview… I kinda like the midly jaded anti-FUD stance Todd takes.
BTW, link to andyhagans.com is broken :-) (couldn’t help myself)
June 26th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Sorry about that sir, I will repair this right away!
Google will probably throw this interview in the trash because I edited it too many times today, yay how gay, thanks G! ;-(
June 26th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Great interview, Aaron. You might want to Cliff Note it a bit or maybe have subheaders or something though. It reads rather long.
June 26th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Great interview. Nice!
June 27th, 2006 at 3:28 am
Great interview with a wealth of information. I kept following and reading the cited links. Took me almost an hour to get through!
June 27th, 2006 at 4:52 am
Great interview Aaron Todd know his stuff. Interesting comment on the subdomain abuse.
June 27th, 2006 at 7:15 am
Aaron,
I want to thank you and Todd for the great interview. I always enjoy hearing from the experts on the big picture.
June 27th, 2006 at 10:46 am
Hey Aaron, excellent interview with Todd. Great blog!
June 27th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Thank you all, Todd is one of the best and it was great getting him to answer a few questions for us.
June 28th, 2006 at 8:50 am
never read articles this long, but this was nice.
thanks, though where are the ’secrets’ on link building ;)
June 28th, 2006 at 11:10 am
The post is actually not long, it is narrow, I will work to drop the navbar out on the right and widen it.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Great questions, and great answers. The stuff great inteviews are made of. Keep up the good work Aaron:-)
June 29th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Another great interview Aaron! Todd I always enjoy reading your opinion, your well ahead of the curve, well done mate!
July 2nd, 2006 at 10:33 am
Congrats Todd :)
July 9th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Nice interview - it isn’t often though that something smart doesn’t come out of Todd’s mouth whenever something about him gets published online, so it comes as no surprise. :)
January 17th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Really enjoyed the interview. Lots of great information in there.