The way I see it, and I mean this somewhat respectfully and can even understand your point, but it sounds like you are just pissed off that everyone can see your links. I hear you on that as well, the web sucks, everyone can see what you do. But who says you have to be in this? Hard to walk away, I know. I hear you, but dont knock his tool, just stay one step ahead and use it on your competitors as well. Hopefully you will make enough money to live life, although you may not be a billionaire you dream of.

http://sphinn.com/story/80142#c56223

Read his departing comment in his last post. Specifically, find this statement:

“I do recognize that we are more of this roguish, agressive sort, and I think it’s one of the reasons there’s a lot of hostility. As I said, we’re not changing direction on that now, but we’ll definitely think long and hard about it. Thanks!”

This tool and firm has turned into no better than your average scraper bots servers all over have to deal with. Two bit scrapers/spammers come to mind.

You cannot possibly compare this to something like hitwise, etc. The moz person promotes himself as ethical and a best practices SEO who speaks at ALL conferences and spends big bucks presenting himself as the gawd. That’s a big difference to some silly hitwise. Give me a break. LOL

What? 8 or 9 years? Now that’s funny. How about since 2004. I’ve been giving to the community for eleven years now, and much for FREE. What do you think the industry would say to me if I had done the exact same thing in the same way seomoz did? I certainly know that answer. Don’t give me the free stuff argument as it doesn’t fly. Besides; this guy has a history of being in the middle of things like this. Check the history.

As for the evasiveness of the tool, how is this any different than AdGooRoo and their ad scrappers for PPC; or ComScore/HitWise that buy ISP data to figure out competitor keywords, PPC v. SEO keywords, downstream and upstream referral traffic?

Does HitWise provide full disclosure on where they get their data from so we can block it? Ha. Not at all. Ditto with Compete and others. Yet, we’re demanding SEOMoz to disclose their secret sauce?

So about the competition…Should I be worried? Maybe, but honestly I expect the competitors to be after me. If they are, that means I’m doing my job and will have to keep at it.

I understand that paranoia but it’s exactly that: paranoia.

Also, it’s interesting how intense the criticisms of Rand has been given that fact he’s contributed a lot of free information over the past 8-9 years Rand has been in the SEO business.

The self-righteousness is needless and reminds me of the “OMG WTF crowd” that infects the “wisdom of the crowd” at times: http://tinyurl.com/omg-wtf-crowd

It’s also very telling that sphinn decided to shut off comments in that thread after ONE day of discussion, and on a weekend at that. It only means those who take the weekend off either have to comment in the original blog thread, or don’t comment at all. It’s very telling considering the close business ties between Rand and Danny Sullivan. It says a whole bunch… none of it good.

I’ll bet dollars to donuts you and ALL others thought Rand had built this great spider/robot that actually had 30 billion pages, right? You would have been wrong, just like all of us were wrong. The way he went about launching this thing and had his developers out there promoting it, etc and also posting stuff to make all of us think this was the firm’s OWN stuff is extremely deceitful. There is no other way to describe it. And now; although you and others would never block things anyhoo, those of us who would want to block it,….. MANY; cannot do so…… not at all, unless we also block google, yahoo, etc, etc.

Not good. There is no way he can take it all back and start over again either.

http://sphinn.com/story.php?id=79700

I must say I am at the point that I feel I don’t understand much. This is obviously “SEVERE BREACH OF TRUST” (like Sean put it).

Despite the fact that I do not support the whole blocking thing, I believe SEOmoz should be more open and also should have considered this before the official launch.

I’d love your opinion.