Dirsensei Web Directory Blog

We have been following this Rand Fishkin and his SEOMOZ blog. More lies and more self publicity. His attacks on web directories especially Aviva has brought a popular debate on the internet and somewhat a war between SEO’s and Web Directory Owners. His latest publications of lies, deceit, self promotion ala Howard Stern and published at Smackdown Blog of Michael Vandemar had me puking. This Circus Clown Rand Fishkin is so great at making up excuses after excuses and would not stop. Just a simple “I am very sorry to Aviva Web Directory Owner” or an “I apologize to the Directory Industry” for creating this whole mess would be ok. But no he wants to create MORE popularity for himself and plays it like Howard Stern to go BIGTIME. A smart move that only a manipulative Street Mart Vendor in Asia can do this.

Here are his latest….by Rand Fishkin

So many points to try to address in this post, but I’ll do my best.

1) You are totally correct that I wrote a post marketing our list of directories addition to the premium content, but I’m not sure what’s wrong with that. I wasn’t attacking directories to make people sign up for membership - I was doing it because all our testing and link building over the past few years has been showing me that there really is a very, very tiny amount of value in general directory link building.

Give it a try! Go to a list like StrongestDirectories.com and buy links at all of those low-mid range general directories that market in people’s signatures at Digitalpoint and V7N. Make it for a moderately competitive market like “hvac training school” or similar. Let me know if buying all those directory links gets you any ranking - my experience has been that it just doesn’t provide good ranks, but if your experience is different and you want to champion the value of those general directories, I’d love to see some examples and would be happy to blog about the value if you can show it.

2) Is rankings a fair way to value links for rankings? In my opinion it is. We disagree on that, and that’s OK - John Scott, who’s a very smart SEO, and many other folks disagree as well. There are plenty of people on both sides of this issue, but my experience puts me heavily on the “good rankings = generally high value from links.” Poor rankings for many unique terms in a title tag and on a page can also often spell a penalty or dampening of some type. For directories, this has always set off red flags to me that Google doesn’t trust them because they’re linking out to some shady sites.

3) Is it inaccurate to say that directory owners got upset with us? I’m pretty sure they did… Was there a lot of comment from non-directory owners in those threads? If so, I do apologize for my generalization - I just saw a bunch of links to directories in the signatures of the criticizing members.

4) Honestly there’s not a lot of “spin” going on. These are just topics that were on my mind. In fact, believe it or not, I had no idea that Jane was making a follow-up post on the subject. She’s had her own criticism aimed at some of her private projects on sites like Digg, so I think it was an issue close to her heart. In either case, I can say honestly that there’s no intention to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes - they were just subjects that were interesting to us (independently).

5) RealEstateWebmasters from 3.5 years ago - yeah, that was a total wrong-headed move. I think it was actually the start of my decision to go white hat. I hated the idea that I was hiding something and overall, I think it made me a better SEO. I do still apologize to anyone who was part of that (I think we got 3-4 links out of that and I tried to personally address all of those folks). After a couple months and some apologies, REWebmasters let me back in, which was very nice of them.

6) SOCEngine - you’re totally right on this. I think it provides no value - it’s a general directory with almost no value. I’ll ask the crew to shut it down - it has been barely operating the last couple years. We’ll just keep it in existence but kill the submissions so anyone who is listed now will continue to be listed.

As you’ll note, I haven’t promoted it at all in 3 years. It’s certainly not an income source for us in any meaningful way.

7) The personal attack seems very, very harsh here. I think the message is “don’t trust Rand or SEOmoz - they’re trying to pull a fast one on the SEO world.” I work really, really hard to try to do just the opposite, so obviously, I’m heartbroken to see this kind of post. I guess we can always work harder, though, and I’ll try to do that when I return from vacation.

In the meantime, please do consider responding to my email.

Best,
Rand

Sure Rand whatever Floats your Boat. But attacking web directories and not looking at your face if there are dirt in it and could look at others dirt is a prime example of HYPOCRISY at its BEST.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 7:13 am and is filed under Web Directory Blog, News and Media Blog, Internet Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.