BigMouthMedia – all talk or deserved success?
Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: February 6th, 2008 Published in: Branding, Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Agencies
I’ll kick off things with disclosing that I don’t have a very high opinion of BigMouthMedia. I worked there Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 and left fairly disenchanted with the company having had more than one disagreement with the powers that be about various things and some blog posts which ultimately led to them threatening legal action! 
Shame, would have been great link bait!
Matt (a former GlobalMedia employee who left around the time of the BigMouthMedia merger) wrote a post the other day about BigMouthMedia’s rankings on the back of a discussion about whether or not rankings = quality. Go ahead and read that – not worth me spending much time on the back story here as it’s covered well over at SEOtunes (but read my SEO agency copywriting sins article as well!).
What I thought I would do here was look at some of the reasons that BigMouthMedia have succeeded and touch on some of issues that can come with it.
Experience, experience, experience
One of the key issues that BigMouthMedia faced growing over the past years is finding experienced staff. I’d venture a question for you – was this intentional or just a consequence of their location / the state of the industry?
Probably a bit of both.
When i started in Jan 2005, BMM was only around 15 people – that was with quite a large client portfolio even back then (I don’t really recall, but guessing I’d say around 200 clients). Basically the company was a load of Account Managers (of which I was one), supported by some sales and tech staff (the tech guys being the core of SEO experience within the company). By the time I left in Jan 2006 the company was up to around 30 staff – the Account Management team had grown the most but the tech team hadn’t recruited any more experienced SEOs.
Not to take anything away from the people they did recruit who were all talented tech bods – they just didn’t have any SEO experience and needed to be trained.
During this time, the Account Management team had grown a lot but there was really only flirting attempts at serious training. Keep in mind, these are the people who are completing strategy documents for clients who paid £x,xxx (or more) for the document. I overheard some crazy stuff being told directly to clients in that time – just down to lack of training. The most non liable example I can think of is someone advising a big brand over the phone to make full use of “RSS CSS feeds”…
So where is BigMouthMedia now? Over 200 employees and probably over 500 clients I’d guess. But how many experienced “SEO hours” is each client receiving each month on average?
I don’t want to be too critical about the BigMouthMedia service as I am biased but I think a more general point can be made here. Despite an extensive client list I’d guess that *some* clients may be better off pound for pound working with a small agency or consultant. What do you think?
Does size matter?
I believe it does but I also believe there’s a point of diminishing returns (aka “growing pains”). Finding experienced staff isn’t easy, particularly in a field where someone with a couple years experience can go it alone and make more money than an agency would pay (well, BigMouthMedia weren’t helped along with the crap salaries they paid though!).
So with very strong marketing efforts, good rankings (resulting in good leads), big brands on the client list and a strong sales force led up by Steve Leach and the other company directors, BigMouthMedia found it easy to get clients. Well, not easy – just easier in comparison with other agencies – all the right boxes were ticked to get the sales process started and BMM had the key staff to close the deals.
But with growth comes more problems. I heard ’round the campfire that a year after I left the staff count had doubled yet no more experienced SEOs had been hired. Worse still, only a few had even made it to the interview process!
This could have been a critical point for BigMouthMedia – bad PR or an exodus of staff could have seriously crippled the business. And getting banned from Google around this time couldn’t have helped lol! 
Merger to the rescue!
Along came the deal with GlobalMedia which probably changed the fate of BigMouthMedia. As I said before, BMM weren’t exactly forthcoming with liberal salaries (of course, it could have just been for me given I wasn’t exactly employee of the month much! ) – some people familiar with the business speculated that budgets were kept tight in order to make the company look more lucrative to investors – I’m not certain if this was the case or not.
There had been an awful lot of graduate / entry level career people recruited throughout my time (and the salaries matched the experience levels) and I reckon the GlobalMedia deal brought a more mature company model to what BigMouthMedia had become (which was essentially a small inexperienced company being held together by key members of staff). BigMouthMedia didn’t grow up well – the time between 12 employees and 50 employees didn’t have much structure. Everyone had “Manager” in their job title, and there wasn’t much in the way of formal training.
I have likened it to a glorified call centre before – I’m not certain if that is entirely fair or not though. I think I’ll leave you to judge that one.
GlobalMedia brought international offices (and not just shared offices used once a week *cough*) and the structure of a larger company to BigMouthMedia – I think more than anything that was the injection of life the company needed.
Big is best?
Well if you believe BigMouthMedia’s press releases, then big is best. But then again, there are so many press releases each day you might miss it.
Going back to the topic of Matt’s original article on SEOtunes, how does quality relate to success?
Do good industry rankings equate to SEO talent? To some extent I believe so, and I also believe good rankings also equate to good marketing efforts (which usually go unsung in this industry). Certainly I wouldn’t question BigMouthMedia’s top end SEO skills, led by Head of SEO, Andrew Girdwood who has been around for years and is very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO (as is JZ – dunno if he has a blog / public profile to link to though).
But in the same breath – I wouldn’t equate the experience of the rest of the company to that of these two people. There is a level of dilution of skills when you rely on key members of staff to carry a lot of others. While new or inexperienced members of staff could competently review some sites for SEO purposes, that’s no substitute for a high level of experience looking at the site. That for me is a problem if you are selling yourself based on the experience your staff have.
It’s back to that “do rankings = quality?” question again. They suggest quality (or at least skill / knowledge), just like big brands on the client list do. I don’t think they equal quality though.
Sales…sales…sales!
The key to the success of BigMouthMedia has been the strength of their sales team and in my opinion one of the areas many SEO agencies undervalue. There are many other areas that they have failed on in the past (or continue to fail on by some estimations) – but sales isn’t one of them.
I know that could sound like a nippy remark (given the negative conations associated with “sales guys” sometimes) – it isn’t intended as such. Sales is a vastly important area of business and BigMouthMedia serve as a good example of how much benefit it can be.
Whether or not BMM “deserve” their success is another question. I’m *mostly* in the camp of “if they achieved it, then they deserve it”, which I feel is a fair assessment to a certain extent. On the other hand, some would argue that it’s not the destination that’s important – it’s the journey, and certainly BigMouthMedia have made some questionable decisions over the years.
Open your Big Mouth!
Spill the beans. What do you think?
Does BigMouthMedia deserve the success they had or do you hate them with a passion? Give your reasons – keep it clean (or email me the dirty secrets)! Are their rankings the secret of their success or a consequence of them?
I find myself in a weird position of knowing many negative accounts, and being weary of anything positive said. Help me free my mind!
Scott
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I think there’s a bit of rank envy in the SEO world when it comes to bigmouth. Same thing that happens with Google, everyone badmouths them beause of their success. IMO if you succeed at something then it is deserved.
Good post Scott!
How strange, when I was reading this it looked all too familiar. I feel I need to throw in a different opinion about the merger with Global Media who certainly weren’t a big cheese in terms of being a big SEO agency. They had a number of offices in International location which were thrown up very quickly over a short space of time, you know the kind, get some little man with an address in Hong Kong or wherever and say we have offices there…skills and experience didn’t come into it.
Like ANY online marketing agency the actual skills are usually held by a small handful of people, maybe even one. GM had ‘sales’ skills but not much marketing skill. They also had a silver tongued UK MD and CEO who could charm the pants of anyone and sell sand to the arabs. Recruitment across GM, particularly account managers tended to be college students on gap years to keep salaries to a minimum,these people knew nothing about marketing, they didn’t need to, the MD taught them what to say and if needed HE did all the talking. The SEO team themselves were a pretty inexperienced bunch by the time of the merger, SEO’s with skills didnt hang around very long there and jumped ship long before (as did the large clients they serviced!).
The companies that pay big agency fees usually have big budgets that they have to spend in order to get the same budget for the year after so they are never going to go to a small company especially when small companies can’t afford to wine, dine and smooze them like bigger agencies can.
Nobody can disagree that BMM have got what appears to be a very good business model. They charge the earth because they know its not just what their target market will pay, its what they WANT to pay. If smaller agencies want to win big clients like BMM they need to up their price and reduce their service. Harsh, but true.
Cheers Jonny!
I agree to an extent that some SEOs may be envious of the success of BMM, but I don’t think it’s nearly quite as many as people would assume.
Howdy doobedoobe!
I didn’t know much about Global Media other than what I read elsewhere – I assumed they were big and I just never heard of them before (hey, I was a SEO for 4 years before finding out who BMM were and that was only because I Googled “SEO Edinburgh” or something!). I think that situation differs to BMM slightly in that they were able to retain most (if not all?) key members of staff.
It would be amusing if everything they said was exaggerated – only 3 staff, 6 clients and Steve Leach only owns a photo of a castle!
The post is very interesting in its general context and probably a fair reflection on how the overall BMM agency works. Yes there are successful and it does breed a certain level of jealous from other agencies and individuals that’s just natural especially when in certain areas it really is undeserved but hey that’s business and some will do whatever it takes.
In regards to the merger let’s make this clear that it was Global Media who purchased Big Mouth Media purely based on the profitability of the company, so a merger is slightly misleading it was actually a purchase of a smaller SEO company. The directors at Big Mouth then re-invested part of the payment received back into the company to retain senior director positions which is fair enough.
This is the mistake made by Global Media directors and what you saw after this was the systematic dismantling of the Global Media from inside by means good and bad, as a result and honestly posted on media news site by Steve Leech (with a few self promoting twists on the truth) it turned into a reverse takeover with
Big Mouth becoming the dominant directors.
So what happened next, well Big Mouth recruited staff for Edinburgh and for Edinburgh and Edinburgh again while using the Manchester office (Global Media Head Office in the UK) to extract information, techniques, processes and just about squeezed every inch of life out it.
Then it made redundancies something that had been promised would not happen as part of the so called merger, were the staff incompetent no they had already been replaced in Edinburgh in the previous months so what you saw was a lot of experienced staff being sacked (for want of a better word), and from the feedback I got the process was done as if Mr Bean had been in charge of it.
Since then you have seen a members of Global Media staff leaving pretty much month on month and this is not just restricted to the UK, the Germany office as an example saw the whole technical team leave at the same time.
Why was nobody aware of this because they have covered there tracks very effectively, Sherlock Holmes would have trouble finding the information, and that’s down maintaining a certain company image for the general media, clients and public audience.
Big Mouth is like a Narcissist in many ways with a touch of paranoid that everyone is out to get them, maybe they are. But when you’re at the Top that’s what happens.
To summarise I think Big Mouth are successful but do I think they care about there employees…not a chance, its all about bottom line. The best place to work and investors in people awards etc are pure company propaganda which is something they are incredible good at. Media awards are deserved with prove in the results so they is no getting round that.
Do I wish them the best for the Future not a chance.
Hi Scott,
An *excellent* article, spot on. You’ve summed up my (albeit brief) experience of bigmouth right there. You have to give a nod to their success and the obvious talents of some of their staff, but for a self-proclaimed “ethical” company they have been involved in some awfully shady dealings, not least the “merger” with Global Media. I even forget myself sometimes that it WAS Global Media that bought bigmouth and not the other way around, however they like to spin it (I notice the “A Global Media Company” has been taken off their tag line – the brand is now totally defunct).
I wish whoever Global Media Staff is had left their name, I can only speculate that they are, like me, one of staff that was caught in the exodus from Manchester during or shortly after the “merger”. We have about as much reason to be ticked off with bigmouth as anyone.
But I’d still like their position for “search engine optimisation” ;o)
Some interesting comments there guys – a lot was news to me.
I knew that Global Media had technically bought over BMM and then something happened to “switch” the relationship round, but didn’t know the details.
I’m surprised to hear that there has been such an exodus from the non Edinburgh offices though (well, not surprised it happened, but more it was allowed to happen). It takes a fair amount of mis-management to allow so many experienced staff walk (or to push them) – particularly when experience is so cruicial to this industry.
That said, when I left in 2006 I wasn’t the only one to go – IIRC at least half a dozen (out of 25-30 staff) walked within the same month (for various different reasons).
Found this on Lucidite today which made me chuckle – http://www.lucidite.co.uk/cheeky-bigmouthmedia-redirect/23/ – looks like someone snapped up the BMM .eu domain and pointed it to the BigMouthMedia banned from Google thread on Threadwatch lol.
Scott
Just as a foot note 2 more ex Global Media staff have been sacked I mean made redundant in the Manchester Office so from a exisiting team of around 30 only 6 remain with only 3 actually media staff the others are tech support so if you where being paranoid you would say they dont like manchester too mjuch. With the we Love Big Mouth day coming round for its 1 year anniversary thats some turnaround from last years comments made by the directors….looks like the Love has gone
[...] you stopping by. Enjoy!If you have not read this on sphinn or on Fused Nation, then head over to BigMouthMedia – All talk or deserved success. Not only is this a great article by Scott but there is also some very thought provoking [...]
Interesting stuff!
It is a shame that staff are being made redundant in this manner – the SEO industry has plenty of issues recruiting experienced staff so to start pruning off entire offices just to keep everything at the HQ end seems daft to me.
I’m sure the ex Global Media staff won’t have any problems finding work elsewhere – there’s loads of work to be had out there for experienced SEOs.
Scott
[...] bigmouth media Blog Posting Bookmark It Hide Sites This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under News, Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]
Great post. I’ve always been curious as to the success of BMM. I think it was a case of being at the right place at the right time. They have succeded in building a strong brand though.
I think there is an element of being at the right place at the right time – BMM have been around for a while and certainly the sales approach they took to marketing their services worked well, particularly for big brands.
I guess you could call the BMM brand strong in some respects, but looking at it from an SEO industry perspective, the brand strength is quite low – how many SEOs have a bad opinion of BMM? Quite a lot compared to any other SEO agency out there IMO.
Your blog made me think. Companies in, general, are going to have to work a little harder in relations with employees because one of the most common complaints / things people talk about is work, and Internet social networking provides a new opportunity for this. So we all have to be nicer to each other at work (not so bad ..) .
Yup, I’ve thought that for a long time. One of my first sites was a career advice site and there are so many cases of people being screwed around by their employer that it really pisses me off to see people badly treated.
Of course, I don’t believe employees should be tip-toed around, no more than clients should be. But there should be a level of respect and transparency – bullshitting either employees or clients doesn’t get you anywhere.
The SEO industry in particular should pay close attention to staff retention – experience is so important in the long term (I wrote an article about the subject not long ago).
Work is an important part of life for a lot of people – which is why it is terrible to see unecessary layoffs like BMM have done to GM. I hope the remaining staff appreciate the price they paid to “work with the likes of Tesco, Hilton and BA”!
Strangely enough this is the week bigmouthmedia move offices in Manchester to a smaller (no surprise) office in the city center, i hear they are operating a first come, first seated in the morning the rest have to work from Starbucks across the road.
Ironically, they’ve started using the term “bigworldmedia” on their homepage animated banner – which is the name of a company that offers corporate and workplace cultural diversity training…
[...] Big Mouth Media [...]
It still amazes me after being sent the following press release by BMM that they claim and I quote:
UK Managing Director Lyndsay Menzies commented: “Having a team of happy, focused and motivated people has been a key factor in bigmouthmedia’s success and it is crucial we maintain that atmosphere. With continued growth of our existing search business and further expansion of our display advertising, affiliate and copywriting services we expect staff numbers across our offices to double over the next 12 months. “I’m delighted that Nicola has joined us and look forward to seeing her exciting and innovative ideas put into practice.”
After making the HR in Manchester redundant and she worked very hard for them, to release this backs up my previous statement on they internal self promotion rubbish they pump out . “Having a team of happy, focused and motivated people†well I don’t she is happy, focused or motivated by BMM, the rule is quite clear if your not in Edinburgh your not invited.
h*ttp://express-press-release.com/46/Bigmouthmedia%20attracts%20new%20people%20person.php
Just as a foot note:
Claim by bigmouthmedia
Founded in 1997, bigmouthmedia are leaders in digital marketing, with a team of over 200 staff across 13 offices in 10 countries on 3 continents the company maximizes return and exposure for major brands online through a variety of fully integrated digital marketing channels: Search Engine Optimisation, PPC, Online Media Planning, Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking, Brand Monitoring, Online PR and Web Analytics.
Correct version
Founded in 1997, bigmouthmedia are leaders in digital marketing, with a team of over 50 staff across 3 offices in 2 countries on 2 continents the company maximizes return and exposure for major brands online through a variety of fully integrated digital marketing channels: Search Engine Optimisation, PPC, Online Media Planning, Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking, Brand Monitoring, Online PR and Web Analytics.
Add Global Media from the 2007 and you can then increase staff and countries not from 1997….that’s 10 years of extra’s there are claiming..shame on you
You know, I think I have to side with BMM on part of that – regardless of how the acquisition ended up, I think it’s a fair approach to promote the staff totals, offices and so on in press releases. May not be a detailed account of how it was achieved, but nonetheless it is a relatively fair appraisal of the situation and common practice in PR I’d say.
I don’t get your first point though. Are you saying Nicola was already employed with BMM and this press release is announcing the promotion (as opposed to the recruitment)? And that she made the HR staff in Manchester redundant? Or just pointing out an example of BMM laying off staff in one location just to recruit in another?
Scott
This is posted in response to doobedoobe post of the 6th February with regard to his comments about Global Media. He said:
“Global Media who certainly weren’t a big cheese in terms of being a big SEO agency. They had a number of offices in International location which were thrown up very quickly over a short space of time, you know the kind, get some little man with an address in Hong Kong or wherever and say we have offices there…skills and experience didn’t come into it.
Like ANY online marketing agency the actual skills are usually held by a small handful of people, maybe even one. GM had ’sales’ skills but not much marketing skill. They also had a silver tongued UK MD and CEO who could charm the pants of anyone and sell sand to the arabs.”
You obviously don’t have any clue what you’re talking about.
I was SEO Manager for Global Media from late ’98 to ’04. I don’t know how you would define a ‘big cheese’ SEO company but I was doing SEO work for the FA, The Tote, Nationwide Building Society, Littlewoods, Opodo, Fish4, Pickfords, Butlins, Yes Car Credit, Warner, Haven Holidays,Transform Medical, Manchester City Art Galleries, and giving seminars to the DTI. You can safely call that big. That’s just the UK clients, I haven’t even mentioned the French and German ones.
As for ‘little man with an address’, I suppose I must have imagined the 15-odd people in e.g. the Munich office that I visited four times a year, or training up the Paris SEO staff for rolling out European programmes, and so on.
Not much marketing skill? When a client is making 1,100 sales a month with an average vale of £6,000, or thanks you for sending them 150,000 extra visitors in the first month of a program, or ask you to turn off the SEO because they can’t handle the volume, you’ll find they beg to differ,
I’m not an apologist for Global Media, by the way. Everyone who was there when I started, got out by the time I’d left. Don’t blame ‘em and I’m glad I left. However, when someone’s spouting rubbish relating to work you were doing, like doobedoobe was, you have to call them on it.
Hey George and thanks for dropping by – it’s great to get another perspective on the topic.
I think perhaps Doobie may have been commenting more on GM at the time of the acquisition (2006) – after all if you left in 2004 it could very well be the case that GM is a different company a few years down the line (I know that BMM is very different now compared to when I left in 2005)?
Certainly though, I don’t think anyone is questioning the relative success of both BMM and GM over the years – regardless of personal opinions of both companies before and after the acquisition, no one can argue that each business has / had an impressive client portfolio, SEO skill base and overall marketing strategy.
My, this post has turned into an interesting series of comments.
Keep em coming!
Scott
Hi Scott,
“after all if you left in 2004 it could very well be the case that GM is a different company a few years down the line”
- a fair point, that. I’m sure it’s true.
On a tangent, a bit of trivia: Global Media is continually referred to as a German company – it was actually founded in Manchester (by my brother as it happens) as Primedia, then became Global Media Communications, then Global Media. It’s true that Tommy (Gertheis), who founded the Munich office, bought out my brother’s controlling share of the company and then got the Carlyle Group involved. So I suppose you could call it a German company in the same way you’d call Rolls Royce a German company. But, it was founded in Manchester and proud of it.
Cheers
George
Haha good to know!
In response to George, I was indeed referring to the GM post-2004 and I apologise for insinuating it had always been that way.
You might not like to hear negatives about GM but when founding management ‘departed’ it did go down hill while it chose to groom new staff to ‘appear’ to do well instead of giving them opportunity to deliver a truly good service. Existing skilled staff had their passion for their work sucked out of them which is why they too, over time, eventually left the company.
In my rant aimed at the (post 2004) leadership I was unfair in my comments about the staff at the time of the merger and take that back, there were indeed a few skilled staff around who continued to fight the politics and deliver a good service but it seems they were repaid with a big fat GOODBYE when BMM took over.
I reffered to the appearance of international locations and I stand by that, of course the German office was an exception but I would still question how many of them had the skills and how many were there because they were cheap. If you wanted to use a web marketing company to deliver you an effective campaign would you rather go with the company that was made up of a small number of very skilled professionals or one that had a high number of unskilled staff over several locations?
I’m not a BMM lover and my positive comments regarding the success of their current operation is not reflective of my opinions on how they choose to deliver their service and it’s value for money.
Hi Doobedoobe,
I don’t mind hearing negatives about Global Media, from all the comments (and from contacts with people I know who were at Global Media after I left) it’s pretty clear it went steeply downhill in terms of service. And as I say, I’m glad I left. Even at the end while I was there, it was crystal clear that the senior management were just moneygrabbers – that was one of the major reasons I left.
International offices: The Munich and Paris offices were serious ventures, there was a Brussels office too but that didn’t make it (if you just have an address, an address can’t fail. If you are setting up an office properly as a business, it can). Any other locations than that, I have no personal knowledge of. Maybe what you’re saying about the other offices is true, I don’t know.
Another bit of trivia – Global Media started out as a web design company, and didn’t offer anything like SEO for the first couple of years. The search marketing thing was tacked on later – then when management saw how profitable it was, it became more and more prominent as a service. Then it obviously became the centrepiece of the company.
Re BMM, the most important thing I know about them is that they got BMW and themselves banned for hidden text. Getting good ranks is one thing – getting BMW banned must be one of the most idiotic things ever done in the history of SEO.
Anyhow, what’s your background, doobedoobe? It looks like you’re well up on the UK SEO loop.
Great posts from everyone with a some good and silly comments but generally enjoying the whole thing and good to see people still have some passion for they work….and ex employers
hi george, ive been around a bit, not donkeys but enough to have a good grasp and know when something is bollox. we’ve spoke before too but i tend not to post with my real identity because I would have to be diplomatic and nice and that would be just too apple pie for me. others might not agree with that’s tough really
there’s more i would like to divulge about a certain person at GM but that would be getting a bit too close to the bone and betraying someone elses trust.
I didn’t know GM started as a web design co. Maybe I knew once, but have forgotten. Interesting tho.
Do you mean the BMW doorway page incident? At the time GM german office was looking after their PPC campaign and when the news came through some assumed it was GM’s error.
When big companies make mistakes they tend to be made an example of with manual removals. When small companies do the same thing (and the index is rife with it) they appear to get away with it for long enough to monetise from it. spam reports are simply ‘used’ to improve algo’s.
I guess it’s good when these examples are made; we can use it to find out what we might get away with and what its best not to take the risk on, depending on how visible you are as an seo/internet marketing company.
Hang on – BMW were a BMM / GM client at the time of the ban? Lol didn’t know that – I remember there was a lot of speculation around the time but I just put that down to other SEOs leaving sarcastic comments on Threadwatch, etc.
TBH I think the stuff that got BMM banned was an immensely stupid risk – it was one of the turning points of my time there when they added that little CSS text rotater to the homepage (and to client sites) – lost a lot of respect for the company after that. The penalty would really have been a slap in the face for them – despite their public statements about it being down to a newbie employee who got sacked, it was in fact entirely down to senior SEO guys (I think you can guess who!).
More trivia – BMM also started out as a web development agency who never offered SEO services either. And their current head of SEO started with the company with no SEO experience at all and was trained entirely on the job. (lol, ditto for most their other senior positions)
Oops, sorry, my bad. Apologies!!!! BMW’s SEO company was Netbooster. Doh!
Doobedoobe, OK, if anonymity means more open posts then that’s cool by me. Got me posting here anyway
So we’ve spoken before? I’m intrigued.
I agree naming names is a bit wrong – I could spill skeletons out of the closet too, obv., but then probably anyone at any business could so there’s no percentage in it.
I’m pretty sure BMW’s removal was a manual edit…they were out for 4-5 days as I recall.
Great thread, anyway.
Yeh it has been an interesting discussion – I didn’t expect all these responses when I wrote the article!
Thanks for taking the time to contribute in the discussion everyone.
Scott
“I’m pretty sure BMW’s removal was a manual edit…they were out for 4-5 days as I recall.”
Almost certainly. And used as an example by google too.
Most Google ‘spam’ detection is manual imo. How many times do you come across really bad ‘doorway’ pages that rank for target terms? Sure they are usually long tail but it’s laughable. Google says it doesnt use the reports for manual removal (ahem?); that they are used for improvements and testing. So why is it they STILL havent worked out how to automatically remove the doorway spam and manufactured crosslinks with ‘fake’ sites when they must get hundreds of spam reports every day? Of course smaller sites do from time to time get manually removed but it can take them months to get accepted back in the fold, a far cry from the brief shun experienced by BMW!
[...] In response to this post, Scott over at Fused Nation has written regarding his experience at bigmouthmedia, which lead to some very interesting comments – worth checking [...]
Hi,
I must say some of the work Global Media were producing where pure cookie cutting SPAM pages with no fresh content. These tactics work for FR and DE as the restrictions against spam seem alot lower, however eventually resulted in our company being banned in UK and DE.
I was very surprised the merger between GM and BMM as the SEO strategy that comes out of the businesses are considerably different. but i guess that doesnt matter when global domination matters!
Hmmm OK fair enough, but without names + examples I don’t think we can take that comment too seriously (as with the other anon comments).
Scott
I dont think its fair to name names as the pages are not live anymore… spamming technique worked in de and fr and proved to give massive financial results… you could get away with murder in these markets. you pretty much still can…. Google wasnt particular fair in banning some companies where spam like this still exists in the rankings!
http://www.flugbuchung.com/billigfluege/Flug-nach-Washington.php
http://www.flugbuchung.com/billigfluege/Flug-nach-Chicago.php
Debatable whether or not that is spam. The pages still have function for users. It’s just not a very inventive application of SEO or location specific targeting. Bad SEO doesn’t necessarily equal spam IMO. But it does serve as a good example of why the marketing department should have more say on the quality of pages being produced by their website.
I think they break google guidelines and would be considered as spam.
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Heh yeh I guess – just trying to play Devil’s advocate. At least the pages have some function and aren’t like the normal SEO doorway page crap!
To be fair though, Global Media hasn’t existed for well over a year now, and I can only guess how far back before they merged with bigmouth that they worked with “ex Global Media client”, but I imagine we’re talking about work that is over 2 years old now. “Cookie Cutter” pages did work then, and as has been said they brought in a lot of money. Unfortunately Google sometimes moves the goalposts, like it has done recently with regards to sponsored links, and some sites do get caught in the crossfire… Global realised this and Bigmouth certainly have suffered for it in the past too.
I’d question if those pages were really spam either to be honest, and also if that alone was the reason for the sites banning (I might be able to help more if I knew what site we were talking about).
[...] comments from a post (regardless of what they say), but I removed a series of comments from the Bigmouthmedia post made over the weekend which really didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t the content of [...]
Very interesting blog! Agree with most of what has been written, Steve Leach 80 zillion pounds or whatever he is worth, you cannot knock that or BMM client list. Looking outside in when the merger took place I was looking forward to GM embracing BMM. They looked like they had a lot to offer GM, larger clients, a more relaxed attitude in the office etc. But it was soon clear that there was no transparency over what went on in the past. Regarding the CSS trick that got BMM de indexed; we were told it was a “blip”….basically that BMM were not responsible it was somehow Google’s fault. I don’t want to go into exactly what was said for fear of incriminating myself but the gist was it wasn’t a deliberate ploy.
Agree totally about the hiring inexperienced staff and suppressing salaries, don’t think the Carlyle thing helped this one bit. I don’t understand why they cannot share their vast proceeds a bit more with the rank and file? Or why they don’t look to recruit the top SEO’s and account managers? I think BMM think that they are somehow doing you a favour by employing you and that this makes up for a very moderate salary.
I also noticed that this blog ranks number 4 for “bigmouthmedia”! Excellent work, can hear Girdy cursing as I type this comment. Bit of reputation management needed I think, after all, that’s what they are good at!
Hey JZ, thanks for dropping by.
Yeh that client list is pretty sweet when all things are said and done – I don’t think anyone can take away from the work that’s gone into acheiving a portfolio on that scale, particularly within an industry like this one.
I know this is going to sound like an odd comment from someone who has been known as “Marketing Guy” on the SEO forums for years, but I think you have to take any communication from any marketing organisation with a pinch of salt. A marketing led organisation that employs marketing people and sells marketing services is always going to have an element of “spin” in it’s communications, both internal and external. In fairness to BMM, the whole ban from Google thing probably really scared them shitless at a crucial time of the company’s growth – it’s understandable they wanted to try and smooth over the rough patch as best they could and that includes both internal and external PR. Most companies would have done the same in some shape or form and perhaps we might not agree with the approach BMM took, but I think we can appreiciate the motivation.
Can’t comment on the BMM recruitment / salary policy though. I got paid a crap salary when I worked there, although I hear the staff are better paid (relatively) these days.
“Excellent work, can hear Girdy cursing as I type this comment”
Whatever do you mean?
That was their “brand protection” response to a post I made back in 2006. You’ll note the page has since been slapped by Google and carries no weight whatsoever.
To be honest, I never expected such a response to this thread – thought it would be an interesting article at the time, but we’re 4 months down the line and it’s picked up a few interesting passengers along the way. The ranking is just a reflection of that – nothing artificial in terms of SEO work has been done. Just good writing and an interesting topic that’s picked up some natural links.
You must be a BMM employee to refer to Andrew Girdwood as Girdy!
An observation from left field on BMM as a true outsider.
I cannot help but notice the core gimmick of the upside down mouth characters is something that was used on an Australian talent show back in the early 80′s and did the rounds. Aka ‘REDFACES’ methinks? Not that BMM are unique in plagarism but I’m calling it a dud hand none the less. Originality – 1 out of 5.
Please spare us all yet another atypical press release with adjectives enmasse and the belief BMM is on the verge of curing cancer and reversing global warming.
That doesn’t qualify as plagarism – the concept of the upside down faces isn’t owned by anyone. Technically we could all go and do our own version – as BMM have shown us it’s easy to do – you just need a digital camera and some staff with time on their hands!
It was either Tennents Lager or McEwans Lager that did a “chin heads” ad campaign in the 80′s on UK TV – at least, that’s the first time I saw it. Interestingly enough, my marketing lecturer at Uni was involved with that campaign (although that’s entirely coincidental – BMM did the chin heads thing after I left the company).
Just checked again, ranking number 3, oh dear! Well apart from being completely biased which I am, can you think of any other search or even ad agencies where this kind of thread exists? In my opinion is they had this coming, not sure British Airways, Arcadia, Hilton will care though! Amusement all the same though.
I have read this whole post with great delight. There was one point that came out that small agencies need to start to charge the large fees that BMM do….. As an insider what sort of fees are these?? HOW BIG…. surely you can give some guidance on this
Hi Tony,
I don’t think it’s any big secret – check out some business forums and you can get an idea of SEO costs – they can range from anywhere between a few hundred pounds per month to thousands.
Scott
This is quite old now but I just wanted to chip in a bit more.
Interesting about the german language cookie cutter example from GM… I don’t recognise the page so it was probably done after I left GM but this probably has its roots in a strategy I came up with for Opodo, but hasn’t been carried out fully – it has the functionality but not the content. Its shaving the edges of spam, I agree, but here’s what I would have wanted to the page to look like if it had been done diligently:
http://www.opodo.co.uk/uk/flights/copenhagen/flights.htm
http://www.opodo.co.uk/uk/flights/paris/flights.htm
I came up with content like that for something like 200 pages, then their copywriter worked on it, I rechecked it and so on. So if you look at the content on those pages, there’s nothing cookie about it. I should also say those pages have less functionality than when I was working on them, there were links to travel guides, hotels in the city, personal reviews and so on. So I’m disappointed that GM didn’t put more effort into the examples previously posted. The only difference between being a useful page, and a borderline spam page, is the effort you put in, IMO.
What do you guys think?
>> The only difference between being a useful page, and a borderline spam page, is the effort you put in, IMO.
Yeh I think that’s a great way to look at it. The difference between doing the minimum needed to get the page ranking for any given term and the minimum needed to make the page useful for users. IMO the latter is always the best long term strategy.
Scott
What is Steve Leach’s management style. He must be smart to become CEO. Heard he likes to delegate. Thought his UK MD was young and wet around ears. Why are BMM ranked 1 if they fell out with Google. How do they manage to get No1. How much did GM pay BMM. How did Steve make his gazillions? Is the Credit Crunch going to affect BMM.
What was BMM turnover, profit before tax or after tax and sales price.
On a ratio of 10 x £3M (profit) = £30M. How did CEO make gazillions.
I say fair play. You make friends and enemies (unfortunately) and hard decisions have to be made. I lost my job but its part of the process I should have started off on my own and offered competition.
“Keep in mind, these are the people who are completing strategy documents for clients who paid £x,xxx (or more) for the document.”
Indeed. Also keep in mind that, as of 2 days ago, much of the advice that you’ll find in that and other paid-for “strategies” is available in Google’s free and fully approved SEO Starter Guide. Why anyone would pay for this advice (only to then have to pay their IT team or webmasters to implement it) is beyond me.
Well in fairness to BMM and every other SEO out there, the paid-for advice is slightly more detailed than Google’s document. Many client sites come with serious technical problems and larger sites are infinitely more complicated optimisation campaigns. The Google guide is decent, but as the title says, it’s only a “starter guide”. I can show you starter guides for graphic design – it doesn’t mean that you could effectively design your own corporate branding with it.
Has anyone recently typed in ‘search engine optimisation’ into Google recently. Bigmouthmedia are nowhere to be seen. They haven’t been listed for 1 week now.
Mile
Yeh it looks like their homepage has been penalised. It’s not cached by Google anymore and doesn’t appear in site: searches. I wonder if they’ll come out and say it was a glitch with Google like they did when they got banned last time?
It takes a special kind of SEO company to get banned from Google twice, particularly when high / extremely strong rankings had already been achieved. That’s a lot of traffic and a lot of sales leads to lose when you’re at the business end of a recession.
It’s interesting, I thought BMM media were untouchable – clearly not. Considering they have been dominating the market in 1st or 2nd position, I’m surprised to see them suddenly disappear. That’s going to be a massive dent in their profits. The owner is worth over 20 million, so I don’t think he’ll be too effected!
They can probably weather the storm, but given the current economic climate and the fact that their rankings were such a large source of leads, it could begin to sting if they don’t fix it soon.
I’m surprised it’s lasted over a week so far – when they were banned from Google in 2006 they fixed the spam quite quick and Google relisted them within a few days. Suggests that they might not have indentifyed the problem yet (although it only took me about 10 mins of quick research to come up with the potential candidates!).
I think it’s just a balls up you know, same thing has just happened to one of my clients http://www.koshcreative.co.uk, though that is a brand new site. I have been seeing some other strange things in the serps today as well, homepages ranking where sub pages should be ranking and stuff. Google might just be broke.
I do like the you comments on size matters: I know that One account manager can not perform effective SEO on more than 4 accounts the variables needed these days to monitor SEO and perform effective direct response online marketing its not physically possible to deliver the best results for the clients. We work with many clients around the UK and our account managers are never bogged down with more than one client.
It most likely is a balls up Dave, but could just as easily have been an err of judgement (i.e. throwing too many crap keyword links at the site). I think the example you gave is largely down to the site being new though.
SEODAN, depends on the size and phase of the project IMO. It’s good to have focus on the client as much as possible though.
Scott
Much as I previously have disliked them, they’ve just got a stupid dev somewhere in the process. A cache: command on the homepage shows you everything you need to know.
What are you referring to? Up until this morning, there was no Google cache (there is one now).
Haha scratch that, I see what you mean.
You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Nuff Said
Oi! I used to work for BMM and I’m no monkey!
I expect at least a banana with my peanuts and that’s why I left!
I’ve worked at bigmouthmedia recently so hopefully can give a more updated view of what it’s like to work there now and what bigmouth as an seo company are like. I think it’s very similar to your experience but since yours is a few years old I thought it would be good to show how little had changed. For me the biggest concern is that while you could get by running an seo company this way a few years ago, the industry has changed. Bigmouthmedia however hasn’t.
Experienced Staff:
While there may have been some experienced staff when you worked there, these days there is barely any. Bigmouth take on graduates straight out of university and within a few weeks they’re on phonecalls, giving out seo advice to clients. Most of them start off as an account shadow initially but it isn’t long before they take on their own accounts. The majority of people (both newbies and old timers) don’t have a blog/website of their own, have never done any seo before and have no experience of handling clients. That doesn’t matter too much however as all clients are given an seo plan and series of recommendations that is completely templated. You simply use find and replace ##clientname## and voila you have an seo strategy that you can bill your clients several grand for.
This is a template that hasn’t really changed much in several years. It sorts out basic things like title tags, meta descriptions, and a few crawling issues but doesn’t go into much depth. Some recommendations are in there purely for an upsell e.g. “your site hasn’t been social bookmarked much which is a poor quality signal”. Oh yeah we sell social bookmarking, you should buy 20 hours of that at £120 per hour.
For bigger technical issues, the tech might get involved and add a few bullet points. In fairness to the technical seo team, they’re generally reasonably the most knowledgeable people within the company, although the benchmark account managers set is pretty horrific. Any other ‘seo insight’ a client might get would be regurgitated from other seo blogs – there’s no innovation, testing or anything like that. If it isn’t already covered a million times on seo blogs then you’re not going to hear about it.
Hiring grads on starter salaries and giving them all a templated seo plan for their clients was one way bigmouth managed to keep costs down. Another way was to simply give each account manager as many clients as possible. So now not only do you have an account manager who doesn’t really know what he’s doing handling your account but he or she also doesn’t have the time to do anything worthwhile. He can simply make the standard recommendations (hey you should get a blog or news service because then you’ll have loads of fresh content which search engines love. Oh yeah we sell a news service. You should buy up a few months of that at £80 per page. ) or you need some linkbuilding. We could submit some articles to article directories at £700 per article or a PR for close to a grand. We’ve only ever had these PRs get picked up by a journalist a handful of times but you’ll get lots of ‘great’ links that will really help with your site’s rankings. Despite the farmer update, bigmouth are still selling all of this as fast as they can although clients are quickly cottoning on and jumping ship.
Middle Management
In bigmouth you don’t get promoted for knowing anything about seo. You get promoted for the more shit you can sell, regardless of whether or not that’s of benefit to your client. Unfortunately while this system is very profitable you end up with a lot of people close to the top who are good at upselling the bigmouth products but have no real knowledge of seo. These people then go on to lead and ‘mentor’ the teams of new recruits and so the vicious circle continues. You also end up with a lot of client churn, but then marketing and sales is there game. They can always get new clients, but can rarely keep them.
I don’t think a lot has changed at bigmouth. We have cooler offices now and are obviously an Lbi company as well. Yes it was a legally a buyout but referred to as a merger for marketing and financial reasons one of them being that you mightn’t think bigmouth is as big as they want to come across if they were simply another Lbi buyout.
Wow, I’m actually pretty surprised that after 6 years it sounds like things are exactly the same! You pretty much outlined my experience with the company (although it was much smaller and a very different company at the time) to the letter.
The tech guys were always the only ones with any SEO experience really – account management is more of a customer service role to be fair, although I think BMM like to promote AM’s as specialists, etc. Although it was the experienced tech team that managed to get their site banned from Google back in 2006 lol!
And £700 per article…lol…slight increase from when I was there, but not much.
The company may fail in many areas, but give them credit where it’s due – they are great at one thing – selling!
Worked for LBi/BMM briefly….
What amuses me is how the link building program currently works. Write an article and send it to as many directories/submission sites as possible. Christ know’s what they charge clients for that kind of shite.
My favourite bit was when they asked “so, why are you leaving?” and then acted completely surprised that anyone would want to leave. Ignorance is bliss, in oh so many ways.
Nice!
Did you point them to this post?
I updated my Linkedin profile last week to include my time at BMM. I don’t think the tongue in cheek job description I wrote went down well – my profile has been view by several “people who work at BMI” since then…
There are certain members of middle management who don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to online. How they are able to retain their position, let alone get promoted every year, baffles me.
Also, if you’re a freelance writer for bmm expecting to get paid within a month of invoicing, forget it. You’ll be lucky if you get your money 12 weeks later, and that’s only if you email and phone them every day to remind them that you need to eat and pay rent.
To be fair, lots of larger companies drag their heels when paying bills to prop up their cashflow – sadly it’s fairly common practice.
This is true. One month after invoicing is reasonable, and even understandable (despite their claims to pay within 2 weeks). However some people are still owed £300 from last November. Kind of taking the sublime to the ridiculous, I’d say.
I gave up freelancing for them after they dropped the rates from 26 to 15 per article. im sure by now its dropped even lower. If the way they treat their freelancers is any indication of how they treat their staff, well I feel sorry for all of them (but more sorry for myself).
Ah I remember the £50 per article days!
Wonder what BMMs policy is for employees doing SEO work on the side….. OOermissus
Probably the same as any other agency I’d imagine. I doubt they care though, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit to be had that isn’t profitable for agencies to take on, but part time freelancers can do very well for the client who gets a cost effective service.