Our Policy on Tips, Tipsters, and “Outing”

Here’s an easy theoretical way to ruin an SEO competitor’s life.

1. Buy a bunch of links to their site.
2. Contact Digital Due Diligence.
3. Wait for the story to hit big news sites.
4. Watch your competitor’s rankings—even rankings they’ve legitimately earned—get torched by Google.

The good news: this has never happened. Better news: it never will. Internally, we’ve had a long-standing policy about getting tips, and it’s time to make it explicit.

Here’s our rule: If we get a tip about a particular site’s SEO, we will absolutely not talk to the press about that site. We’ve put this in place for a simple reason: to many SEO practitioners, the existence of a consultancy like ours sounds like a chance for them to run their own personal SEO hit squad. We’re not interested in that scenario. Moreover, we’re not interested in being largely negative.

(The numbers tell the story, here. We’ve gotten far more pageviews—and far more revenue—from positive content.)

A Few Good Questions

If you won’t talk to the press, who will you talk to?

We’ll still talk to our financial clients. We’re in the business of warning people when their investments may go south, or encouraging them when their investments have a great future, and we’re not going to risk that franchise. Thus far, no one in the SEO industry has expressed any concern about that end of the business.

And that’s a reasonable way to operate. Very few traders want to mix PR and trading that way: if they’re betting against a stock, they’re likely to keep it quiet while they accumulate a position.

Won’t this help black-hats?

It might. We’re not on a crusade to rid the world of link-buyers, keyword-stuffers, or cloakers; we just want to make sure that people who invest in them know what they’re getting into.

Should we trust you?

Digital Due Diligence is in an industry built on trust. Clients tell us the details of their investment and acquisition strategy, and we’re expected to keep our mouths securely shut. If we gave them any good reason to suspect that we’d share information, we’d lose our entire revenue base in a heartbeat.

You created this policy to keep from getting gamed. Can this policy get gamed?

Perhaps. It will be interesting to see the response. Hopefully, people will stop telling us about tiny, tedious gray-hat strategems in random local SEO campaigns. Perhaps we won’t hear about the next big link-buyer until someone else outs them.

Doesn’t this affect Digital Due Diligence’s business model?

No. We’ve gotten the vast majority of our ideas from a) our own examination of suspicious search results, and b) clients asking us to check something out before they invest. While the SEO community has been concerned about “tips” from competing SEOs trying to burn one another, that hasn’t been a major factor yet. Of course, anyone who wants to contact us and rant about what their competition is up to can drop us a line. We always want to know the latest in dubious or crafty SEO methodologies, and competitors always know. But if you choose to do that, keep in mind that you’re keeping it out of the New York Times and Techcrunch.