In June Jeff wrote this post on his blog which made Rand out razed. The discussion was about the fact that should SEOMoz’s Page Strength tool be put in the Quick Buck Crew, this website lists the people who cheat, scam and do everything for money!

Well what the issue was that SEOMoz built a tool named Page Strength Tool whose function was to tell the strength of page which by calculating IBLs, they never were correct with this tool! Jeff and many webmasters helped this tool to get popularity among the others on the net. Rand then made that tool used by free members only once a day and for premium members where you have to pay them to use that tool they kept unlimited usage!!!

Now after a month Rand came back up with his white board friday and sued Aviva directory by saying that they are not an authority site based on the fact that they don’t rank for the terms in the title of Aviva Directory which happens to contain “Information Web Directory”. Well as we all know Jeff does brilliant promotion for his directory. He has been in the front page of Digg more than once and has received a lot of organic links! Well every body knows that domain age, organic IBLs are the chief factor of gaining authority!

Well as everybody has a friend John of v7n takes a good participation in this contest. He gives his brilliant SEO insights in this post and a good discussion starts in this thread. Then Rand himself replies to this thread and says doing such type of protection was out of character!

It doesn’t suit a reputed SEO to talk like that on a public forum!

Then we found that Bob Mutch of seocompany.ca joins to protect rand by saying that rand is correct and Aviva is not a authority site (lol he couldn’t make the difference between authority domain and authority site) in this post. John made valid points in his replies but bob kept on disagreeing in this thread and this thread.

Then Mike also had the same view that “Web directory” was a worth less keyword, as the traffic coming from it would be worthless in this post.

Then I too got my boots on and went in to give my opinions of solid analytical reasoning why rand’s opinion was baseless, incorrect, pointless, inconsistent and even not to bob’s own belief!

What i felt is that this is very true! You just can’t judge a website for it’s being authority or not on the base of it’s not ranking for the title terms which are too competitive. If Jeff had known that his directory would be in such a deep trouble for not ranking for his title terms he really would have looked in to the matter and did the SEO of his directory. Well anchor text IBLs are the chief factor of SEO this is again proved. But just mix things up (bob even didn’t knew this, I had to tell him that it is good to mix up things…hehe)!

Well whatever happens to this discussion, let your mind be clear about whom to listen and whom to not! Otherwise you would be losing a hefty sum and get nothing in return!

Manish Pandey,
Proud Member of Frogengine Blog Network.