Conductor Extracts Itself from WeWork via @martinibuster
0Reported today on Search Engine Journal
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Conductor Extracts Itself from WeWork
SEO Technology company Conductor announced today that they have successfully bought out the company from WeWork.
The deal involved 250 employee and management co-founders plus outside investment. The co-founders will continue as majority shareholders with a new class of stock (founder-preferred shares).
Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik in a statement said:
"We're grateful for our time with WeWork, during which we've been able to invest aggressively in R&D, doubling the size of our team with world-class talent that helps our customers achieve success everyday.
People don't want to be advertised to or sold to anymore. Our solutions make it easier for brands to deliver marketing that is helpful and valuable. It's marketing that consumers actually seek out."
Background History of Conductor
Conductor's roots in SEO began as a company offering search marketing technology solutions as well as brokering advertising that Conductor said had an effect on organic rankings. According to a web page from 2009 (archived in Archive.org) that was titled Focused Link Building:
"An ad displayed throughout our publisher network works behind the scenes to positively impact the advertiser's rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo."
It was generally understood in the SEO community that selling links violated Google's guidelines. Thus, I remember being startled in 2009 by the business model of openly brokering links for the purposes of having a "positive impact" on search engine rankings.
Two years later in 2011 Matt Cutts, Google's head of Web Spam wrote:
"People on this thread have already mentioned Conductor, and I've confirmed multiple times that paid links that pass PageRank via Conductor violate our guidelines.
…I also commented on Twitter just