Article Tagged ‘Andy Beal’

Best SES Session - Are Paid Links Evil?

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

by Andy Beal

We’re only half-way through SES San Jose but I think we’ve already seen the best panel discussion of the event.

“Are Paid Links Evil” saw Matt Cutts go head to head with Greg Boser, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio.

The room was packed with marketers all hoping the session would live up to the hype of its carefully crafted title - “session bait” anyone?

We weren’t disappointed and the panel did a fantastic job of discussing such a heated topic. I’m not going to go through the session blow-by-blow because Lisa Barone, Tamar Weinberg, and Rand Fishkin all took fantastic notes.

I encourage you to read the notes and digest the information. Like me, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that buying select links from highly relevant pages isn’t going to get you into trouble with Google. Buying tons of spammy, non-relevant, run of site links, probably will.

Lastly, Rentvine–in a brilliant piece of linkbait–created a video parody of how the panel should have gone.

(Source)

"Highly talented at writing coherently and succinctly " - Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

"Todd Malicoat was ahead of his time ...beating Flickr and the host of drop-E companies that followed..." - Chris Pirilio

"He is, in my opinion, one of the brightest minds in our industry" - Karl Ribas