Jon Cooper

@victorpan someone else noted this as well; will look into for 1st update!

Thanks Vinny! I really appreciate the submission.

So what do you guys think? Worth using, or worth adding to the junk pile of mediocre SEO tools?

Hi Rand - always curious to hear how Moz is doing. What's growth looking like in the last year or two compared to when you guys really took off between 2010-2012?

Just wanted to say: Massive kudos to whoever got this dude to do an AMA here.

I'm surprised; given how much data you have on your own site (Inbound), why aren't you using any of that in your calculations? Could also be the "secret sauce" that other lists can't obtain.

Ex. - average number of upvotes per submission of that domain. (And if there aren't any submissions of that domain, then either A) it's not really an "Inbound marketing" blog if it's not posted here, or B) the quality of the posts aren't worthy of this site, which tells you enough about whether they should be on the list).

With that sheer size of a workforce in this space, what does the onboarding process look like for new hires? How structured is it, and how much does their past experience help/hurt getting up to speed?

Should be a must read for every outreach team. Some of those minute differences in emails (i.e. the semantics of saying "personal website" instead of the repetitive "RossHudgens.com" example) can make a world of a difference as coming off as someone who is human & that actually reads their blog/website.

Hi Hyun! Few things:

- As with most SEOs, I have NDAs with my clients. If I told you all the sites I've built links for, then you can go & copy everything I've done. Not exactly something either me or my clients would want.

- I'm doing a webinar showing one of the sites I am building links for, though, as I do have permission to share about one.

- A large group of those 200 sites is included in the guide (listed in the final section; it's a G Doc link)

- The reason for not offering refunds is that it's a digital product that can easily be read, & a refund asked for.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Umar! Wouldn't recommend it to EVERY link builder, but if you do anything eCommerce related or have any eCom clients, I think you'll be able to get a fair amount out of it.

Thanks for the submission Gareth! Glad I could give your tool a shout.

A highlighted submission about Moz (that's promotional, albeit helpful), a company that backs Inbound, is a great example of what can turn off a lot of marketers to this community (bias)... 

Misspelled Wistia in the title & URL...

If you're going to use a clickbait headline to illustrate a point... at least make sure it's relevant. Had nothing to do with the actual article.

Sorry, but I can't help but not think that the upvotes, and the discussion, around a post about criticizing HubSpot, the company that funds this website, isn't biased. 

Who knows, maybe it's because HubSpot users are drawn to Inbound, but a post about a guy attacking someone who has a dislike for a software company just doesn't seem to be the kind of "shareworthy" content that improves the lives of marketers that Inbound is supposed to serve.

Really glad to hear Jeremy; it really is an efficient process, but I can't say the functionality/features were there even a year and a half ago with the main platform the system is built on (BuzzStream).

Also - maybe we can get #IAMTHEFIVEPERCENT trending on Twitter? :)

I don't know if I'm more impressed with your good taste in content, or the fact he's finished reading it about 4 minutes after it went live. Regardless, you're the man Matthew!

So it's cool to post ads, but only if its the company who funds this site? Got it.

"prominent" might be much, but yeah it's not a good feeling when the practice you specialize in is rooted in the concept of manipulation, even (when done correctly) a lot of it isn't. 

Yeah I STRONGLY disagree with #2. I'm not saying that some of those options don't work (they do, and for the experts who really know how to do it, it'll work for them for a good while), but if there's ever been a pattern of the types of links Google is consistently attacking, it's the ones you have control over. By definition, that's not an editorially given link, if you yourself are placing it.

The funny part is that this article seems to be focused on building an online biz for the long-term, and yet that's such a contradictory tip. Now I'm not saying it'll be difficult to get out of a penalty if Google ends up slapping you for those links (it'll be quite easy, as stated, since you can easily remove them), but think about it: you were dependent on rankings from links that you will no longer have. You might get out of the penalty pretty easily, but you'll have to start from scratch. A business built for the long-term isn't going to want to rebuild any of it's foundation, even if that part doesn't cause everything above it to come immediately crashing down (which would be the case if you've built crap links without any control over).

I'm not against the idea, as for certain people who understand the risks, it's a perfectly valid option, but for goodness sake, wrong item for an article with this title...

(PS - if you're argument that building real active websites, one of the things he mentioned, is actually quite solid, I won't disagree, but please, go and try and build a network of real active sites that would supply enough links to rank. Good luck.)

TIL 'ultimate' doesn't mean what I thought it did.