Calendar
Network
Feeds
randfish
But Jill, that's never been our way. We've always turned to the community - their input, their wisdom and their preferences for decisions like this. I think that without community guidance, SEOmoz would have neither the reach it enjoys nor the successes we've achieved. I think we owe it to our readers (the ones who will be most affected by this decision) to at least hear what they have to say.
As I said on the post, I don't like the tone or style of the content. I don't agree with posting personal attacks and I personally wouldn't publish it. That said, I'm even more against censorship (and into transparency), so I let Rebecca & Marty figure this one out themselves and I think they've done a good job. Marty issued an apology, Rebecca added it to the post and put it back in YOUmoz (rather than leaving it on the main blog) to help clarify the origin.
Sorry for the delay, but the timing was bad on this one. I emailed with folks last night, and we didn't re-connect until this morning at 9:30am (Pacific time).
I'm going to disagree Skittzo - a public re-hashing of these issues will only make this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. Far better that it go quietly into obscurity and fall under the many mistakes that we've made in the past and will try improve upon in the future. The 28K feed subscribers don't want to hear about how we handle disagreements internally, they want SEO advice, better tools, more content, etc. That's what we'll focus on. For those who were attacked or offended, they've been in contact privately through email and we're always happy to answer queries through those channels. Apologies were made directly on the post - that's where they belong - another "let's talk about all the drama" piece is going to be perceived by the vast majority to be a waste of time.
If you wanted to, you could also use the SEOmoz survey data, which looked at around 3,000 search professionals worldwide - http://www.seomoz.org/survey/responses/show/4
I believe the stats there have a big enough representative sample to be accurate (or at least, relevant).
We balance things out pretty well across the ten variables - TBPR is one of the factors, but the weighting is moderate. I'd compare it in importance to something like # of blog search links or news mentions. Slightly heavier weighting goes to factors like # of mentions of the URL on the web and quantity of inlinks via Y!SE. Even then, I think we're providing a relatively balanced picture, but the score itself is only useful as a relative piece of information. Being able to quickly glance over 10-12 pieces of data without individually having to visit those sources is where a lot of the real value will come for more hardcore SEOs.
Hey gang - thanks for the Sphinns. Just FYI - the tool had some serious issues shortly after launch and our devs have been making fixes and re-coding some items to make it smoother, thus lots of tool downtime. With a bit of luck, by tomorrow morning we'll be back up and running clean.
Hugo - you're kidding, right? There's tons of ways to get Yahoo! to expose more than 1,000 links. Try searches like linkdomain:sphinn.com -site:sphinn.com -site:searchengineland.com, or linkdomain:sphinn.com intitle:sphinn -site:sphinn.com or linkdomain:sphinn.com inurl:seo -site:sphinn.com - you can add parameters ad nauseum to get different links showing.
Conceptually, you could just cloak to solve this issue. Show all users who come from outside the US and don't accept cookies (which rogue bots almost never do) a 301 loop (or something equally troublesome) and show users who do take cookies, along with all US/Canada/whatever country you like the right content.
Then, if you need to be really clean, you could also cloak with the Google SERPs referral string, so if a path came from search results (Google's or anyone else's), you could let that visitor through. It would take a very smart bot to figure out how to get around parameters like that, and I'm guessing if you spent a little more time thinking through this, you could come up with some really smart ways to do it that wouldn't get you in trouble.
Story: Is Desphinning rude?
I couldn't resist - this post was just begging for the desphinn.
Honestly, though, I don't see how you could take offense unless the post was something very personal or emotional. Honestly, if I knew that people would be 100% cool with desphinns, I'd probably desphinn about 85% of the submissions here with something like "good story/post, but not quite good enough for the homepage, IMO." Maybe I just have the bar way too high.
It's not just "lies" - it's lies of omission. They want you to "give up your link broker's name, address, etc." If it was black hat SEO, they want the name of the SEO and the company name. It's very personal, which in some ways is surprising.
I won't touch on the hypocrisy of BC complaining about black hat content, but I will say that I find it really sad that you didn't mention all the incredibly valuable advanced, white hat content that came out of the show. If you were shocked at the amount of black hat, which was small, but actually existed on stage for the first time, I'd say that's fair. But you've framed it as though there was nothing else and that's irresponsible.
Michael - I think you have to agree that clearly the post is intended, through the headline and the content, to focus on the black hat issues. There may be caveats, but the post still frames the issue as being the overwhelming takeaway. I know you like to be tough on me, but I think on this one, you're stretching for the criticism (and besides, we have so many mutual friends and shared opinions, we really need to bury the hatchet and move on at some point, right?).
And Lisa - if you're suggesting that there was a lot of black hat content in the business track, the paid track, or the international, recession or analytics sessions, I missed it. This leaves a total of what, 4 sessions out of 22 that you're cherry picking, and even on those, I talked to plenty of people who attended and all said that the only real black hat stuff was in the link building and give it up sessions. You yourself are relying on what was said by other BC folks, so I think it's only fair that I can use information from other mozzers and attendees.
What's really funny is that someone just asked in PRO Q+A today about how to get links to adult sites and we had tons of ideas. However, have to say that this post is really a pretty interesting subject and it does call attention to industries where it's tough to link build naturally and tough (or maybe distasteful) to find the right link partners.
Have to say I'm not totally sure if the title is what I would have used, but hey, it's Frank, right? :)
Story: SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards
This is going to sound weird, but I usually don't think that a lot of SEOmoz's stuff should go onto Sphinn. However, this one's different - Jane, Jeff, Timmy, and the several dozen judges put together something really impressive, so for the first time in a while, I'm actually sphinning something from our own site!
Story: SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards
Actually, I'm just really picky. I don't think 90% of the stuff that goes on Sphinn shouldn't make it here :) It's nothing against SEOmoz, just that only 1 in 10 stories I see here feel like they really belong and are worthwhile. Luckily, this is one of those 10.
Of course, I suppose it would be pretty boring if Sphinn only had 1/10th of the content that's here :)
And yes Rob - congrats to Sphinn for the win! Great work.
One of the things we did at SEOmoz was to take on a client for charity - the Seattle Children's Hospital. It's been a great experience and since we're still in the burn phase of taking VC, doesn't draw from our much needed funds, but still provides an outlet for donation. Obviously, we're doing SEO consulting work, though, as PPC isn't in our realm of expertise.
Despite the fact that he was very disrespectful, this is a silly proposition. I'd be happy to attend conferences where he's speaking, I'll just skip his session. Others might find value there, and there's no reason to block them from getting it.
I think there's a lot more good SEO stuff Flickr could be doing other than just canonicalization. Encouraging better tagging, more content on photos, and offering more embed capabilities to bloggers that provide links back to Flickr would be the tip of the iceberg. I just don't know whether 50,000 more Flickr subs would change MS's bid all that much. After all, they're really not buying Yahoo! to get Flickr or Upcoming or any of those. They want market share in search.
Sorry - I shouldn't have even given him the satisfaction of mentioning it, but was disgusted by that kind of behavior from an invited speaker. As an audience, you give speakers a great deal of respect and as a speaker, it is your responsibility to reciprocate.
For goodness sake, people, there are much better stories out there than this one. Desphinn!
Story: SEOMoz Down?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/latest-firefox-is-causing-problems
The latest FF update did cause problems for around 30% of those who upgraded. It has to do with cookies/sessions so if you delete your SEOmoz cookies, you'll be fine. We've also been wiping everyone's cookies every 12-24 hours (which is annoying because it forces everyone to log in again), but it appears to be the only fix for now (you can read in the thread lots of smart folks contributing ideas to our dev team).
The problem then becomes that people are continuously upgrading over the next few days/weeks, so there will be some folks who keep getting the issue (and we keep having to wipe cookies). Even if we found the exact solution, chances are that we couldn't fix the cookies on users' machines remotely... What may happen is a user-agent detection that auto-wipes on the first visit, but we're concerned that will leave a lot of folks having to re-login consistently...
Other sites experienced this problem as well, BTW...
I'm kinda with sza on this one - not sure this is quite news-worthy, it was just a teaser blog post. Certainly appreciate the kind submission Marty - and great to see you for dinner last night. That Cabernet was terrific and the one I brought home sounds amazing, too :)
Mike - you're totally right. I'm doing just fine, even with Mystery Guest getting laid off. Please donate to a worthier cause!
Ian - great to see you yesterday; really sorry we missed you for dinner, but hopefully we can get together here in Seattle soon.
I just want to point out that the swearing and bleeping out was the WebProNews guys' idea and not mine. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm very unlikely to swear in a professional setting (or any setting for that matter).
This said... It was a lot of fun, and the video's pretty funny, too. I hope folks take it in the spirit with which it's intended :)
Story: Exposing Gray/Black Hat Information - What Should SEOmoz Do?