A little over four years ago, I went on an interview at a very early stage company in Waltham, MA called Aprigo. I remember thinking “these guys are super intense.” They were. And they are.
The challenge: create something out of nothing. Should be easy, right?
We were creating a product that was served from the cloud to help IT professional take control of their unstructured data (files). We then decided to create a version of the product for Google Apps, letting companies see how employees were sharing data in Google’s productivity suite. The thinking was that if a company was using Google Apps, they would still have files on-premise, so we’d give them “Aprigo NINJA for Google Docs” for free to help generate leads for the other product.
Then something funny happened. People wanted to buy the Google Apps version, and didn’t care about the other product.
The Pivot
Our CEO and founders made a decision: We’re going all in. 100% cloud. We were entertaining a name change, and since we were going to be offering security for data in the cloud, I came up with a name I really liked: CloudLock. It was a hard fight against candidates like Cloud Commander (the company’s founders all have a military background), but I think it’s a pretty good name.
Since then, we’ve been able to market and sell to the largest companies in the world that use Google Apps. In fact, we like to say “The largest Google Apps customers in the world trust CloudLock to secure their data.” That’s not just a tagline. It happens to be true.
The Decision
Four years is an awful long time in startup years. And while I continue to believe in the company’s success, it is time for me to move on. So after today, I’ll be taking a long, two-day vacation and will be joining Cambridge-based MineralTree on Thursday.
It’s a completely different market that will require a different set of strategies and tactics than what I’ve been doing here at CloudLock. And I’m ready for that.
Thank You
Though I hope to have thanked everyone individually at CloudLock before the end of the day today, I want to do it here, too. I’ve worked with incredible people at CloudLock and have learned a lot. I wish everyone continued success, and will be following the company closely as it becomes the #1 company people think of when they’re looking to keep information secure in the cloud.
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Matthew Bellows is CEO of Yesware. He is responsible for sales, product vision and strategic direction of the company. As a founder of the company, Matthew brings more than 10 years of extensive sales experience to the company’s goal of helping salespeople close more deals faster. Prior to Yesware, Matthew was the Vice President of Sales and Consumer Strategy at Vivox, the market leader in voice for digital worlds. He previously served as General Manager and Board Member at Floodgate (acquired by Zynga) and as Founder/CEO of WGR Media (acquired by CNET Networks).
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The Down Side of Content Marketing: Spamming is Really Easy.
by Nathan W. Burke on April 3, 2013
Cross posted on medium.
I don’t know why this touched a nerve today, but when I received yet another comment spam notification, I kind of blew up. The trigger:
The Goal of Comment Spam
For years, companies have hired “website promotion firms” to try to get their site ranked higher in search engines, and one tactic is to get as many inbound links as possible. As part of their ranking algorithm, search engines look to see how many sites link to a certain page and count links as “votes”. This is a vast oversimplification, but you get the picture: the more sites that link to your page, the more valuable that page seems to search engines.
And that’s where comment spam comes in. Companies will use software, scripting, and other brute force methods to send what appear to be comments from human beings, hoping that a blog or site author will publish said comment, along with a link to the commenter’s site. And since it’s easy and free to do, why not send the same comment to millions of blogs, hoping that at least some of them will fall for the hoax and publish a link back to a page? Just like email spam, it’s a numbers game.
Content Spam as a Larger Spam Strategy
Because setting up a web site and publishing hundreds of pages of keyword-laden pages is simple (if you don’t care about quality of writing), people will focus on a market, and will create content spam as bait, in the hopes that they will rise through the search engine rankings. The process:
Step One: Find a market that requires local services. In this case,
(I’m not going to use the term in text here, as these spam companies have a history of DDOSing anyone criticizing them). When you’re locked out of your house, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to do a search for 
+ {whatever city you’re in}. This makes a perfect market for spammers.
Step Two: Build a cheap, basic website that can be repeated over and over. Since this is a numbers game, spammers focus on repeatability rather than quality. The example in question:
Look generic enough? Good. Because we’re going to be using this a LOT.
Step Three: Build a few pages that are lousy with keywords. Don’t worry about creating sentences that make sense. Focus on what people are searching for as they’re watching the dog chew up the couch from the back porch. They don’t care about spelling mistakes, they care about getting back inside!
Step Four: Build hundreds of these sites, all linking to one another. Just change “Boston” to any other city you can think of:
Step Five: Sell your services. Go through the yellow pages and call your target with an exclusive offer. Explain that you’re already bringing in x leads a month, and they’re begging for your business. We’ll make you the exclusive {job} in {city}, and you’ll already have a website. We’ll feature your phone number exclusively on a site that’s getting ###,### unique visitors per month.
Step Six: Repeat over and over.
Summary
Some will say that this way of doing business is simply taking advantage of the search engines, and is completely valid. Maybe.
But by spamming blogs and web sites using comment spam to lift these content farm sites to the top of search engine results, that’s not okay. That’s crossing the line. And a quick BBB check tells us that the company behind this spam empire is up to no good:
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