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Recovering From The SEOmoz Guest Post: A Public Apology
In any social community, it’s critical to take feedback from users, grow & apologize. It's especially true for writers, who have a special responsibility when granted a podium. This does not need to go hot. It's not news. Thanks for reading it. There are too many threads to comment in all so I submit here.
We are part of an industry quick to criticize and I'm looking forward to seeing if it has the capacity to forgive.
I appreciate the perspective of every comment in the SEOmoz & Sphinn threads, proud to be a search marketer, want to be a good steward of our industry and grateful for the privilege of being a search blogger.
Thanks to all for your passion, integrity and willingness to truly share what’s on your minds. I wanted to get the post right so I asked Rand and Rebecca if I could rewrite it. They allowed it and you'll find the edited version on YOUmoz. The original comments thread is intact.
The first version of this avatar theory post created a different kind of buzz than intended when published on the homepage of SEOmoz/blog earlier this week. The reaction surprised us all. In it I quoted Matt Cutts from, what I now know he perceived to be, a private conversation.
I apologized to Matt after he publicly unsubscribed to SEOmoz as a result. Since he's Google's highly visible ambassador of spam reduction and when someone (in this case me) quotes something he said said about spam--it can cause a fracas. I was naive.
It's also true that I levied a sarcastic poke at 3 SEOs I respect a lot, by linking out to them on the anchor text "tree hugger SEOs." My bad. Honestly the phrase didn't seem all that rough and tumble to us and I met no offense. I want to specifically apologize To Li who is a very sweet person, talented SEO and I think the world of.
Though it was not about retribution, at least one of the outbound Tree hugger SEO links was to someone who's called me worse. :) Still I understand why the reference could hurt someone's feelings (especially if they did not see the smile on my face and voice inflection) and for that I'm truly sorry. I will say I am a proud tree-hugger myself, usually whilst tapping a Vermont Maple for syrup.
Avatars are an important topic. The SEOmoz community is comprised of amazing thinkers and theorists. I originally asked to post the article on ‘moz because I think the conversation, which has been bubbling under since the “Give it Up” session @ SMX Advanced, is more important than aimClear Blog and deserved a wider readership.
I hoped for the opportunity to discuss avatars. Perhaps that dialog can happen now. Even if you don’t like the theories at hand, I look forward to everyone’s views…and willing to evolve my own perspective from what I learn from y’all.
Sincerely,
Marty
4 Comments
Comments
Other that the Matt Cutts email faux pas, the rest was tame and didn't deserve an apology.
Grow a pair and tell those tree hugging SEOs to get some thick skin as I've been called much worse myself.
Marty, I never called you anything. You thought I called you a jerk after SMX Advanced when I called avatar spaming a "jerk" thing to do. You let me know your objection and I removed the comment. And now you mention it each time you reference me.
I'm not looking for an apology (which is good since I never got one), I've been looking for you to man up and be honest about what you wrote. It wasn't an accident. You got the exact, baiting response you wanted. But you won't take credit for it. Instead you hide behind apologies as fake as your avatars.
If you're not going to be honest, stop commenting and beating a dead horse.
@Lisa: Your comment is revealing on a number of levels. Thank you for the insight. What I can say is that my honesty, in all aspects of these exchanges, has been one piece of this puzzle I will look back on with pride.
I was honest with the anchor text. I got thrashed. I listened to community members, decided that the post was hurtful, changed my approach because I didn’t want hurtful stuff on the net by my hand, apologized and you’re calling me fake for that too. Go figure…
I expected a firestorm for the avatar thing...not the rest. There is not equity in slag-bait.
Let’s talk sometime soon.
And we'll leave it at that. It's the weekend, and I think there's been simply enough drama that's gone on in the past two weeks about who said what, who needs to support whom, etc. etc.
Enough. Seriously, enough. I'm closing this thread, and I'd encourage everyone to simply take the weekend off and consider on Monday if we can get back to a period where we're just talking about search marketing and lose this incredible amount of personal baiting, hyped headlines, exaggerated points and other nonsense that's been going on.
Let's start acting like we're in a room together and speaking to each other online exactly as we would. And consider actually talking directly to each other about stuff via email, phone calls or other methods before we start going off on each other indirectly through dueling blog posts.