Have you ever taken some time to reflect on Google’s massive list of acquisitions and mergers?
It’s a bit scary if you do. Actually, it might make some of you go hide in the woods before the robots arrive and take over.
For the uninitiated, check out this list on Wikipedia and just scan through some of those prices.
Is this for real? Yup, they throw around gazillions of dollars like it’s monopoly money.
But that isn’t all, they invest in more than just this list of mergers and acquisitions. This is where “Google Ventures” comes in, their investment arm which allows them to dip into all kinds of cool stuff.
And that is where things can get a little sketchy. What happens when an investment is heavily fueled by organic SEO from their very own engine?
This is concerning to a lot of people in the SEO community, but let’s be honest, Google doesn’t give a shit about us.
The reality of the situation beyond just a bunch of whiny SEOs is the potential anti-trust implications, general shittyness, and hypocrisy from Google’s double dipping.
A few years back I wrote a saucy piece about RetailMeNot being backed by Google ventures which led to some more light being shined on the company.
All was well, then they received a minor penalty. Shortly there after a full recovery. What’s troubling is this seems to be a reoccurring theme with companies getting outted for questionable SEO who are also backed by Google Ventures. The most recent case was with Thumbtack.com who has done very well with aggressive local SEO growth and also received $100 million from Google ventures.
These guys were doing some shady shit, no doubt about that, and once it came in the public spotlight from this post (quite similar to my RetailMeNot piece) it was only a matter of time until the hammer came down.
Sorry buddy, but been there done that, check my post date ;-)
Okay, maybe a bit of jealousy there because his post got shared by Master Fishkin himself and wound up delivering a straight KO punch right in Thumbtack’s gonads.
All pretty standard stuff so far, but then Thumbtack managed to get the fastest “get out of jail free” card in the history of Google penalties.
In under a fucking week!
That’s right, less than seven days and out of the penalty box with shitloads of new backlinks from us SEOs.
Have we been trolled? Kind of seems like it but before we start spazzing out we need an overview of all the Google ventures backed companies who have crushed it with SEO. We need numbers to dig deeper into what is actually going on.
The Great Big List of Google Ventures Backed SEO Sites
To get started I went to GV.com/portfolio (sorry bros, nofollow) and pulled all the outbound links.
Shazam, got a list of all their URLs. Now onto SEMRush to get some data on all these.
But before getting there I noticed Thumbtack.com is not on the list of Google Ventures investments. Wait a second, there is another “investment arm”, Google Capital which has some interesting companies under its wing as well. Lendingclub, Surveymonkey, Thumbtack, Glassdoor, Credit Karma, and Auction.com to name a few.
So farther down the rabbit hole we go. There was one problem though, it was going to take me all day to download 200+ reports one by one. At this point I was forced to utilize the small amount of tech skill I have and use the SEMrush API. But wait, why not just send a quick email instead? Thankfully I have a contact over there and they helped me out. Big thanks you guys are awesome.
Here is the data I pulled, enjoy :-)
Google's Portfolio Monthly SEO Stats
Provided by SEMrush| Domain | Organic Keywords | Organic Traffic | Organic Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| creditkarma.com | 92,767 | 5,945,665 | $14,900,000 |
| glassdoor.com | 1,125,085 | 7,097,346 | $14,200,000 |
| retailmenot.com | 331,019 | 12,128,660 | $9,946,189 |
| thumbtack.com | 109,262 | 536,320 | $4,500,000 |
| uber.com | 12,554 | 1,750,090 | $3,683,236 |
| Lendingclub.com | 7,778 | 390,688 | $3,400,000 |
| homeaway.com | 222,315 | 2,218,832 | $2,687,534 |
| hubspot.com | 28,152 | 324,900 | $1,872,331 |
| lendup.com | 5,460 | 150,432 | $1,197,143 |
| tunein.com | 156,713 | 2,168,876 | $1,024,655 |
| rocketlawyer.com | 29,000 | 367,732 | $940,574 |
| Surveymonkey.com | 19,694 | 544,694 | $794,000 |
| desmos.com | 4,303 | 468,331 | $699,566 |
| hellofax.com | 1,735 | 44,972 | $551,940 |
| ondeck.com | 882 | 27,988 | $550,326 |
| angel.co | 24,635 | 225,992 | $526,856 |
| docusign.com | 2,497 | 183,580 | $504,096 |
| nest.com | 5,631 | 398,228 | $454,584 |
| cloudera.com | 3,344 | 61,289 | $413,412 |
| creativelive.com | 4,124 | 69,258 | $386,879 |
| medium.com | 22,522 | 298,602 | $363,433 |
| kabam.com | 2,176 | 128,012 | $361,086 |
| custommade.com | 22,815 | 213,455 | $326,309 |
| uberconference.com | 1,554 | 16,692 | $242,118 |
| Auction.com | 10,841 | 157,030 | $223,000 |
| mapr.com | 868 | 12,769 | $184,000 |
| duolingo.com | 5,866 | 64,257 | $175,000 |
| optimizely.com | 762 | 25,433 | $152,785 |
| bluebottlecoffee.com | 1,583 | 102,544 | $141,356 |
| onemedical.com | 8,801 | 110,828 | $128,398 |
| parse.com | 1,037 | 37,257 | $120,962 |
| freshdesk.com | 1,880 | 8,886 | $118,000 |
| puppetlabs.com | 2,238 | 35,247 | $114,509 |
| Renaissance.com | 2,609 | 160,579 | $112,000 |
| getpocket.com | 917 | 72,839 | $102,724 |
| scan.me | 1,387 | 33,929 | $85,265 |
| relayrides.com | 11,449 | 53,173 | $74,995 |
| nimble.com | 310 | 12,574 | $65,088 |
| zenpayroll.com | 1,939 | 6,679 | $64,334 |
| zenpayroll.com | 1,939 | 6,679 | $64,300 |
| egnyte.com | 1,024 | 14,540 | $57,988 |
| duosecurity.com | 763 | 16,869 | $54,465 |
| side.cr | 302 | 36,661 | $53,975 |
| nextdoor.com | 12,490 | 102,806 | $51,966 |
| rabb.it | 307 | 47,385 | $49,996 |
| gyft.com | 3,044 | 33,286 | $46,281 |
| yesware.com | 886 | 4,996 | $43,676 |
| about.me | 24,715 | 97,425 | $43,199 |
| collaborate.com | 14 | 1,654 | $42,015 |
| upstart.com | 285 | 6,663 | $40,969 |
| signpost.com | 350 | 9,115 | $38,937 |
| abacus.com | 52 | 8,652 | $38,729 |
| cleanpowerfinance.com | 142 | 3,128 | $34,019 |
| circleup.com | 246 | 3,666 | $33,963 |
| slack.com | 204 | 102,266 | $33,864 |
| homejoy.com | 819 | 3,645 | $32,170 |
| secret.ly | 27 | 9,025 | $31,261 |
| highfive.com | 175 | 6,566 | $27,944 |
| shopspring.com | 113 | 10,847 | $27,405 |
| clearstorydata.com | 12 | 1,079 | $26,588 |
| reserve.com | 14 | 6,981 | $23,553 |
| disruptorbeam.com | 204 | 8,521 | $21,445 |
| cozy.co | 556 | 15,485 | $20,991 |
| letote.com | 280 | 17,551 | $19,561 |
| rise.us | 32 | 19,185 | $17,207 |
| foundationmedicine.com | 93 | 7,016 | $14,462 |
| moveloot.com | 958 | 12,610 | $14,132 |
| thelevelup.com | 396 | 13,165 | $13,088 |
| easypost.com | 1,804 | 10,192 | $12,433 |
| doctorondemand.com | 218 | 12,717 | $12,252 |
| jet.com | 9 | 10,956 | $11,914 |
| producthunt.com | 2,200 | 7,730 | $11,695 |
| climate.com | 94 | 5,062 | $10,498 |
| zencoder.com | 327 | 1,851 | $9,094 |
| panoramaed.com | 42 | 3,081 | $8,294 |
| flatiron.com | 45 | 5,943 | $8,174 |
| clever.com | 95 | 22,808 | $7,902 |
| keeptruckin.com | 107 | 1,750 | $7,451 |
| coreos.com | 250 | 4,226 | $6,867 |
| noredink.com | 44 | 812 | $6,784 |
| commonfloor.com | 1,757 | 4,462 | $6,600 |
| tamr.com | 20 | 1,529 | $6,303 |
| airtime.com | 6 | 6,267 | $5,516 |
| openbay.com | 1,311 | 1,636 | $5,353 |
| luxevalet.com | 34 | 1,554 | $5,282 |
| digit.co | 39 | 11,109 | $5,075 |
| rockbot.com | 506 | 2,783 | $4,853 |
| scalyr.com | 76 | 230 | $4,620 |
| periscope.tv | 156 | 12,380 | $4,535 |
| shopvida.com | 53 | 1,206 | $4,352 |
| boxbee.com | 33 | 1,649 | $4,219 |
| rally.org | 182 | 1,579 | $4,114 |
| datafox.co | 1,251 | 575 | $3,989 |
| rumblegames.com | 271 | 22,176 | $3,826 |
| weotta.com | 3,091 | 3,326 | $3,769 |
| delighted.com | 7 | 2,547 | $3,606 |
| mindsumo.com | 731 | 1,657 | $3,372 |
| ambition.com | 31 | 7,064 | $3,028 |
| recordedfuture.com | 130 | 1,893 | $2,866 |
| englishcentral.com | 323 | 1,935 | $2,740 |
| datanyze.com | 405 | 969 | $2,720 |
| usesold.com | 147 | 1,384 | $2,616 |
| tryagent.com | 2 | 447 | $2,188 |
| airware.com | 21 | 3,707 | $1,882 |
| eventboard.io | 43 | 118 | $1,549 |
| urx.com | 6 | 758 | $1,424 |
| apptentive.com | 116 | 410 | $1,342 |
| ubersense.com | 344 | 827 | $1,232 |
| bowery.io | 6 | 687 | $1,188 |
| fitstar.com | 280 | 790 | $1,124 |
| highfidelity.io | 21 | 1,090 | $1,089 |
| crittercism.com | 101 | 185 | $1,080 |
| cordproject.co | 3 | 1,038 | $1,036 |
| last.co | 1 | 850 | $1,020 |
| buildingrobotics.com | 7 | 393 | $1,012 |
| seedling.com | 174 | 2,276 | $925 |
| bentoapp.com | 2 | 410 | $859 |
| itsglimpse.com | 6 | 342 | $809 |
| loom.com | 7 | 1,262 | $727 |
| namomedia.com | 17 | 207 | $719 |
| predilytics.com | 10 | 39 | $697 |
| viglink.com | 118 | 275 | $696 |
| unbabel.com | 82 | 239 | $633 |
| trysnowball.com | 9 | 1,800 | $565 |
| kobaltmusic.com | 71 | 2,886 | $543 |
| clarifai.com | 17 | 271 | $536 |
| getpoynt.com | 19 | 1,789 | $497 |
| apptimize.com | 26 | 29 | $434 |
| carnivalmobile.com | 47 | 579 | $427 |
| framed.io | 29 | 172 | $401 |
| flux.io | 11 | 694 | $384 |
| mobileday.com | 46 | 187 | $379 |
| urbanengines.com | 3 | 678 | $357 |
| homelight.com | 696 | 706 | $333 |
| sprucehealth.com | 10 | 1,343 | $319 |
| vungle.com | 54 | 61 | $297 |
| nextbit.com | 3 | 633 | $297 |
| smarterer.com | 100 | 270 | $272 |
| ripplelabs.com | 15 | 1,169 | $254 |
| kamcord.com | 585 | 955 | $230 |
| cliqr.com | 21 | 15 | $217 |
| shapesecurity.com | 17 | 209 | $206 |
| mitro.co | 23 | 1,053 | $191 |
| ngmoco.com | 23 | 1,119 | $140 |
| thinknear.com | 13 | 28 | $110 |
| dnanexus.com | 49 | 118 | $96 |
| djz.com | 264 | 1,362 | $78 |
| jauntvr.com | 31 | 6,949 | $75 |
| coolplanet.com | 20 | 1,140 | $63 |
| threatstream.com | 17 | 43 | $62 |
| divide.com | 66 | 1,721 | $61 |
| messageme.com | 12 | 1,159 | $57 |
| getconfide.com | 13 | 8,530 | $53 |
| rumrapp.com | 27 | 84 | $52 |
| backops.co | 6 | 153 | $39 |
| theorangechef.com | 2 | 140 | $38 |
| synapdx.com | 9 | 11 | $33 |
| aminoapps.com | 125 | 380 | $30 |
| sweetlabs.com | 10 | 138 | $27 |
| mparticle.com | 4 | 4 | $27 |
| payrange.com | 17 | 159 | $24 |
| impossiblefoods.com | 4 | 112 | $16 |
| apportable.com | 21 | 51 | $15 |
| expectlabs.com | 12 | 238 | $13 |
| corduro.com | 1 | - | $10 |
| objectivelogistics.com | 21 | 50 | $8 |
| skycatch.com | 14 | 271 | $8 |
| subtext.com | 19 | 492 | $6 |
| appurify.com | 7 | 16 | $6 |
| golucid.co | 7 | 530 | $5 |
| yieldmo.com | 3 | 2 | $5 |
| heartthis.com | 40 | 26 | $4 |
| mediaspike.com | 3 | 1 | $4 |
| stitchapp.com | 1 | 1 | $4 |
| mixbit.com | 18 | 58 | $3 |
| freshplum.com | 14 | 148 | $3 |
| fullstory.com | 12 | 323 | $3 |
| transphormusa.com | 17 | 45 | $2 |
| synack.com | 8 | 475 | $2 |
| wearableintelligence.com | 3 | 5 | $2 |
| dailycred.com | 14 | 92 | $1 |
| jumpcam.com | 10 | 29 | $1 |
| circuithub.com | 5 | 1 | $1 |
| luminate.com | 4 | 591 | $1 |
| innolight.com | - | - | $0 |
| truelens.com | 14 | 6 | - |
| kensho.com | 7 | 2,071 | - |
| adelphic.com | 7 | - | - |
| altvr.com | 4 | 5 | - |
| puddle.com | 4 | 4,866 | - |
| bloomcloser.com | 3 | 3 | - |
| nifti.com | 3 | 96 | - |
| ranitherapeutics.com | 3 | 255 | - |
| upthere.com | 3 | 251 | - |
| wutwut.com | 3 | 1,925 | - |
| rocana.com | 2 | - | - |
| transcriptic.com | 2 | - | - |
| ledgerx.com | 1 | 2 | - |
| orbitalinsight.com | 1 | - | - |
| astrid.com | 1 | 14 | - |
| getcluster.com | 1 | 36 | - |
| granular.ag | 1 | 4,653 | - |
| luvocracy.com | 1 | - | - |
| n3twork.com | 1 | 2 | - |
| onwander.com | 1 | - | - |
| quettra.com | 1 | - | - |
Some interesting things to note about the data. The total estimated organic traffic cost is about $67 million per month and that is in the United States only. Certainly some of these domains are doing well in other countries so this number is actually much higher.
The next number I found interesting and rather low is the total amount of adwords spend. This is around $2.8 million, not bad compared to their estimated overall organic traffic cost, roughly 23 times the amount. Needless to say, their portfolio is reaping the rewards of their search engine quite strategically.
They’ve hit some of the most profitable industries: coupons, legal, loans, etc.
But hey, wouldn’t you do the same? Well you’re likely not a billion dollar corporation so the implications aren’t quite the same. The real interesting thing is what these properties have done SEO wise.
Let’s look at some explosive growth shall we?
CreditKarma
Watch out, you might break the backlink checker with this one. Phew, how is the air up there guys?
Uber
Google loves them some Uber. Can’t really blame them, they got some big stacks invested there.
Thumbtack
Now this graph might knock you out of your chair when considering they received a penalty.
LendingClub
Need a loan after all the money you wasted on blackhatworld PBN links? Well don’t worry G ventures has got your back. Just do a quick search for “loans” and you’ll find Lendingclub at #3 and Creditkarma at #1.
Shall we dig into the backlinks?
Before we start pointing the finger for anything sketchy, freaking out, and starting a riot let’s consider that most large sites are bound to have at least some spammy links from scraper sites or something similar. So the plan is each site gets the 5 minute Jacob King spam check (trademark pending). If I can find some shit in that amount of time then you can make your own conclusions from there. Let’s take a quick look at these sites hopefully without breaking ahrefs.
CreditKarma
Well they are doing quite nicely. It must be the social signals pushing them to #1 for “credit score” ;-)
Or maybe it’s the 6k+ referring domains? Well I started the spam check timer and found some anchor spam at the 1:35 mark.
Take a peak at their anchor profile, the untrained eye might miss it.
Ah but wait, exact match anchor text? It couldn’t be, yup, yup it is.
Almost looks like some contextual link spam I’d throw out there, damn near the anchor text profile I’d build too. I’m not going to dig into the actual links as the spam check time ran out. I saw some weird site wide links for “free credit score” on realtor sites and figured I could call it good there.
Uber
This one is pretty tough, there are just so many links to look at in only 5 minutes. One thing I did notice that looked a bit strange was links to their geo landing pages with some uniform anchor text. I just randomly clicked to the 7th page of anchors, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Thumbtack
Wow, 32k referring domains, I thought my hair might turn grey waiting for this one to load.
No need to even spam check these dudes since their recent penalty has been posted about a tonnnnn. I’d like to get an estimate of how many new referring domains they picked up from news of their penalty but it’s tough to say with the link removals they did.
LendingClub
This one is just too perfect for a closer. So I started peaking at Lendingclub and nothing popped out at me. Then I decided to navigate to the top pages section and check some link building to specific landing pages. Noticed this guy here with a bunch of spam links and the top anchor “consolidated credit “. But wait, upon closer look that’s our friend negative SEO. It’s almost inevitable to get hit ranking on these big SERPs by some spitefull asshole. It’s next to impossible to drop them and if you’re blasting the main anchor it will probably just help them.
How did I know this was neg SEO? It’s easy when you spot these anchors:
“visit poster’s website” and “strona www”
The first is “visit poster’s website” is a default generic anchor text in the software GSA search engine ranker and the second “strona www” is the default from one of the comment engines.
Signing Off
What can we conclude from all this? Well obviously these sites have done incredibly well and some insights can be gained from them. Although Google has made statements before that an investment doesn’t provide an extra SEO edge or insider information, one still has to wonder.
Is Google double dipping? Is it the ultimate case of “do as we say but not as we do”?
You be the judge.
It would be interesting to see if G increased the CPC costs of the main keywords these guys rank for after they invested to put people off bidding.
My two cents:
1) Link building 2.0: getting a (temporary) penalty for links from high-end SEOs.
2) It sounds to me like the G is using GV and GC to dominate the most competitive verticals/industries through satellite companies in order to avoid backlash, anti-trust cases etc. They should’ve given both a more appropriate name like Googafeller or JPage Morgan.
Googafeller, LMAO!
Great post Jacob.
To be fair, Credit Karma has its name and url’s for most of its anchor text but a very small percentage of it is exact match anchor text – isn’t that how a normal link profile should look like? How else would Google know what keywords to rank the site for? ;)
Google is enormously hypocritical about what is right and wrong.
Looks similar to my GSA blasts ;-)
I found it kind of odd that all 4 graphs you put in the post showed signs of solid growth jumps right around the jan 2014 mark. Thoughts? Algo changes or heavy investments during those times?
Also under the “organic cost” on the SEMRUSH chart, is that their annual adword budget? I’m assuming it can’t be monthly given some are upwards of 14 Million…or am I wrong?
Google also bought Boston Dynamics and a few AI companies, ready for building their robot army.
I probably missed some considering I didn’t find Google capital at first. The only reason I did is I was wondering why Thumbtack isn’t on the G ventures list since I know it’s a G investment. Then did some digging around and found G capital which has their hand in some huge sites as well.
Penalty is all the drama. Even sites which are penalized gets prioritized access to Google’s team. Here is what they have mentioned on their site gv.com
So when they penalize a site, there is a team within Google there to “REVERSE” it. Know which is the best SEO strategy? Bag their investment, site back, spam and RELAX!
Google Capital is newer, I think they just started making larger investments out of there a year or so ago.
Nice digging my friend, it is good to analyze the top players and get some insights in how these most competitive keywords get ranked in the top.
Great research Jacob. Impressive ..
I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here .. the point (to me anyway) is the world is working as it always has – the haves and the have-nots. We live in a society where deep pockets always have an advantage, and a small amount of our energy should be spent fighting it, but not get consumed.
To me this exemplifies why we must focus on great niche markets .. there are literally thousands that the big guys don’t give a fuk about, and you master-seo dudes are making bank with day in and day out.
I hope your readers only use this post as fuel for the deep-burning desire to succeed, do proper homework, and find lucrative markets to work in while learning about what markets to avoid – if a Google partner wants to rank for a word, move on .. be pragmatic about it.
Jacob, I think the work you do here is very important and is supremely appreciated. I don’t see this post as “outing” unfair practices, but rather “educating us that this is the reality, learn to deal with it”. Some may see my view as cynical – but far from it, I’m optimistic – there will always be opportunity for the little guy who’s willing to do the work, take some risks and work smart.
I’m super motivated .. I hope everyone reading this is too.
Cheers!
Wow thanks Keith, for real.
And agreed, I’ve expressed my opinion on “outing” before which is not a positive one lol. So this is about as far as I’ll take it, nothing that isn’t already right out there in the open. But yeah it does make me take a step back and think about how lucrative some markets really are. So much $$ out there…
You tosser, this post is half written in my drafts :)
Haha been in mine for like 2+ months, finally finished her up ;-)
WSO of the week: Let jacob scare you to the point of living in your closet…
I’ll stick to my low competition niches. This shit scares the pants off me though…
nice
Hello Jacob, Thanks a lot for this great article. Did you try PBN before? If yes would you please feel free answer few of these questions:
Suppose I start a blog with Tech niche and different with Health. Now whats we need mainly? Different PBN for different niches? If yes than how much it will cost? Hope, you will have a discussion on this topic
Thanks
Word, I won’t go super in depth on this as we cover it very thoroughly on my forum.
You don’t *need a niche PBN, sure it helps but it’s by no means a requirement. It all depends on your goals, a niche PBN is a much larger committment/investment so you better get it right or you waste a lot of time and resources.
For something that is going to pay huge and very competitive I would build a small niche PBN combined with my larger generic PBN.
Are you going to post about PBN’s anytime soon? Or is everything already on the blackhatstacks forum – the steps to how to create a PBN, how it works, etc. so you won’t make that info public (I totally understand that that’s really valuable info)?
Hey Andrew, yeah I get nervous posting about the technical side of PBNs. On BlackHatStacks we have a very comprehensive guide to setting up PBNs along with my current approach to using them.
The bitter truth here is – Google have build a user base over the years and now they are monetising a small portion of the traffic.
Is there something wrong in that? Even a good king give benefits to their child.
Btw, that was a nice piece of research Jacob.
Cheers
This is a great post but I need to set aside an hour to really read it carefully. Obviously someone has gone to a lot of trouble on the research. I am not a numbers person and semrush and moz make my eye pop but I will make a special effort on this since it is fascinating. I didnt know Google had so many business investments.
Hello sir, how please to do the SEO? Can I make PBN to rank #1 long time? Is the GSA still do the work of many VA full time? PLease advice me soon.
Oh for sure buddy, we’ll penguin proof all your pandas. VA handle GSA? No prob, just get her/him rolling with grindlists.
Nice article. What do you mean exact match anchor text isn’t natural?
That’s because its quality content and in accordance with webmaster guidelines right?
They would happen to be the most searched anchor phrases at all, by any chance?
Some very impressive traffic trends.. wow!
I didn’t say it isn’t natural, depending on the volume of course.
Hi Jacob,
was a quality read as always. Thanks!
My two cents… “strona www” means basically “website” in Polish ;)
Greets,mck
Haha good call, there must be some engine that hits polish sites a lot lol cuz I see that quite often with neg SEO.
“ONE WEIRD TRICK TO IMPROVE SPAM…..GOOGLE HATES HIM”
Language and country filters ftw.
I tried to pm you on pmgrindestone.com, but only found pewep there.
huh?
One word for you Jacob – LEGEND!
And now with Alphabet, they don’t have to adhere specifically to “dont be evil”
mark my words…
Hello Jacob
Are you going to make a post on Alphabet?
Got some insider info there?
And now with Alphabet, they don’t have to adhere specifically to “dont be evil”
mark my words…
That’s true. It’s not like they ever heeded that slogan, it was for marketing purposes.
Man what timing with that alphabet shit, I don’t even know what to make of that honestly.
Nice write up Jacob.
Who cares that they game themselves. They aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s called capitalism, welcome to America.
Dis is a good post though.