In 2007 at SES San Jose we launched a new product called LinkXL. 15 minutes into the start of the first expo day Matt visited our booth and it changed my life. "I've been watching what you guys are doing and it's pretty amazing, but I see a business flaw" Matt said.

Our product, LinkXL was, in all honesty, a way to inject links into the content of a website via some patented software we made (we also had a nifty WordPress plugin). We were at the height of the link brokering industry that many used to modify a Google ranking. As many SEO's knows the anchor text, destination URL, domain, page content and other factors contributed to how much value a backlink would mean for your target site. LinkXL allowed website publishers to have pages of their site indexed and once all the words and phrases were inventoried they could set parameters as to what price they would sell a link for on their site. Advertisers searched for keyword inventory, looked at conditional factors and they could rent a link and pay via our system. They could change the destination URL as much as they wanted and our system updated in seconds on the said web page. It was getting some great response from SEO's.

Back to Matt....

Matt and another Googler watched as we demonstrated LinkXL to a few other attendees. Obviously, Matt quickly drew a crowd. He then came to the front and told me with his beautiful smile that they knew about our system and it had a business flaw. He suggested that we should probably go into something else- another business segment. I asked him what the flaw was to which he replied "The flaw your business has is that it clearly violates Googles TOS. Buying links to manipulate how a website shows up in Google is a no-no." Matt put his hand on my shoulder and look at me with a smile and said: "You should know better."

We laughed and hand further conversation- all positive. Then he wished us luck and continued walking the expo floor.

10 minutes later by chance, we had a user do a demo in our booth and tried to search our name. It was gone. LinkXL was nowhere to be found. Not the direct type in, nada. We were "deep-sixed."

Matt had the last laugh.

We ran hard for another 6 month's and revenue skyrocketed then, Matt officially came out with a statement on link buyers and sellers. Google would no longer tolerate link buying and offenders would be penalized. Within 4 months we decided to sell and get out as revenues slowly declined. We knew the ride was over.

Matt gave good advice that day and with such candor. I've always respected him for this, the delivery of their stance and looking back, the warning he gave us.