I'm fine with it. When a company makes use of "blatantly severe unfair competitive advantages" as Alan said, and they do so publicly for public gain and exposure, then it's fair game to call them out for their cheating behavior.

Until there is some true response from the search engine(s) to penalize those who practice such techniques, then I don't mind our community doing a little self-policing by calling attention to those high-profile sites whose operators try to outrank the sites created by those of us who don't cheat.

Feel free to turn a blind eye if you want, but the industry is being hurt by this every day and those SEOs who take part or ignore it are hurting all of us.

Looking forward to it!

I left Sphinn after being very active that first year. I was one of the top commenters (probably still am) but I haven't truly participated here in a couple years. I left because of all the group voting blocks that would cause a birthday announcement to go hot while important news was over-looked just because the author or submitter wasn't popular or didn't game the system.

It was also extremely time-consuming to just find good news here. The Sphinn feeds were full of spam and self-promotional material. Finding something worthy of a vote became very difficult at certain times of day/night especially if you were actually going to read an article before voting on it.

Anyway, that's why I left. And this change is why I'll come back.

I look forward to seeing the most important news of the day as filtered by the opinion of the Editors here -- and hope some of those who are concerned are given the opportunity to become Editors as well.

Can't wait - and thank you for continuing to try to provide a useful resource for all.