Metafluence

Top tech blogs are in bed with Pronet (and ACS)

So, have you noticed all of the big blogs that are optimized by Pronet Advertising? Techcrunch, Mashable, and GigaOm to name a few (check out the bottom of their pages or sidebars, and ACS is a related company).

I wonder if Pronet is actually charging these clients, or if they are providing a free service to gain the link at the bottom of those juicy pages. If they are doing the latter, I applaud them for being smart enough to realize the reputation and marketing value of being known as the company that optimizes the largest tech blogs on the planet. As far as how they have gained favor with the top blogs it’s likely due to good favor. They have been heavily advertising their ACS products like Crazy Egg on a number of high profile blogs and that gives them good graces. They have also been recognized in the community for their CSS design on the various CSS galleries.

I point all of this out because I’m curious if they are doing the work for free or if they are getting paid. Not to be one to call a person out, but if they are getting paid for optimization there are some big misses that could make these sites better. For example, move navigation and sidebars to the bottom of the HTML and use CSS to position them at the top. This keeps your fresh content at the top of the page where it will rank better. They could also move all JavaScript and CSS in the head of an HTML doc to an external file. This compacts the file size of your HTML, which does two things: 1) Higher placement of content on the page, and 2) Search engines index based on file size volume, so light pages = more pages indexed (or more frequently visited).

Perhaps Pronet is helping those guys in other ways such as link building or keyword research/recommendation. Or, maybe Pronet is offering marketing concepts that have nothing to do with SEO. I’ve thought before about providing free services to high-profile clients to earn reputation cred (in fact I do a little of it already). Whatever way they did it, hats off to Pronet for recognizing the opportunity and seizing it. :)

What do you think about Pronet’s lock-up in the top tech blogs? Have you offered free services to gain reputation credibility?