Do we really want SEOMoz’ Rand to decide what is and isn’t spam?

Ah, Rand. With one simple Google+ post (but worth noting that he didn’t put it on the official SEOMoz blog) he sets off a firestorm about whether he should be deciding what is and isn’t spam, and effectively, whether he should be giving webmasters the ability to put a big rubber stamp of “Hey, our SEO tactics are Rand & SEOMoz approved!” It is just wrong on so many levels. What is happening with the data from the results? Is it being stored in a database to be published later? Is it something the Mozers are going to pull out at one of their conferences on a big show and tell screen so they can show of the good, the bad and the ugly? Or post lists in the members only section of SEOMoz? Actually, as you keep reading through his follow up comments and you will discover it is actually far, far worse. But more on that shortly. What about how secure this data is. Is the secret sauce according to Rand something hackers could get – I am going on the assumption that Rand will consider it is trump card and never publish the factors he decides make up the criteria in the spam or not game. And could this database be hacked and records of all submitted websites and their scores be obtained? Hypothetically speaking, if Shoemoney had used the tool, I am sure many people would give their right leg to see exactly what sites Shoemoney was looking at. Now imagine what a rogue SEO company would pay for a list of websites who all had the top score for what Rand decides is perfection? If he requires you to submit the site for them to check, and he keeps a record of your site and score, what if a spammer got a hold of all the sites your IP submitted? Ouch. Or how happy would you be if you if someone plays connect the dots with all the sites labeled as spam and outs entire networks, not just the spam ones, but the carefully crafted sites that are being fed from the spammy ones? Really, who does this benefit besides Rand himself? Rand makes up the criteria for ranking, based on what he thinks ranking criteria is. Even worse, webmasters will be basing their entire SEO on what Rand thinks are the ranking factors, NOT what Google’s are. And because of his close relationship with Google (you don’t have to look further than his homepage where he has a testimonial from Google’s Avinash Kaushik), many webmasters could take it as gospel, because of that relationship. Rand also mentions it will be included in Mozscape. Nice for SEOMoz, since that seems to imply that only basic access to the spam tool will be free. So for the low, low price of $99/month (minimum) you can have access to it too. I don’t know how many people pay for SEOMoz Pro currently, but I would imagine people would sign up in drives thinking that Rand is revealing the Google secret sauce in his tool. Oh, but wait, want to start learning the secret sauce sooner? Rand drops a little tidbit that

“+Luella Ben Aziza Our data scientist, Matt, will be presenting on his findings at Mozcon, and hopefully building something thereafter, so my guess would be sometime in Q4 2012 or Q1 2013 for a launch.”

So, yes, paying to also attend to Mozcon means you can get early data on the project. But now onto the part I find even more disturbing than Rand playing God mode with what is and isn’t spam. Rand says something even more disturbing:

“My hope is that it is providing broad value, though, and that we're doing it in a balanced, universal way (outing millions of sites, not anyone in particular, and certainly with no motivation other than making information the engines already have more accessible).”

So he has confirmed the intention of outing all discovered websites with this new tool – millions of them! What has given him the right to publicly tar and feather any site, let alone millions of them. It’s like he is creating his own unethical circus sideshow event where you can point and laugh at the baddies. And what if it goes further with a “for your convenience we have added a report spam to Google button” so you can quickly report those spammy sites right to Google so you can be a Google hero too! And on the flip side, spammers keep at least one step ahead of Google, and yes, Rand too. So Mr. Spammy Scammy Webmaster with his cutting edge spam can say “Look at us, we are doing what we are doing and ranking #1, and hey Rand says we are all good with his spam detector tool.” Yeah, that is going to go over well when Rand finally manages to catch up with that spam. That said, there could be value in it if it was used for good instead of evil. Why not make it a tool for webmasters only, requiring site verification, so people can get the data for their own sites? But we know Rand will not do that, because then it really isn’t sexy enough to sell, after all, we want to be able to see and out all the spammy things our competitors are doing. I just want to add that I think Rand is a great guy in the industry. And I get that he wants to do something big and flashy with that $18 million dollars in funding they obtained. I just think this is a really, really bad move for any industry company to be doing outside of a major search engine, especially when it could be mistakes as the word of a search engine. It’s just unfortunate it is Rand that has decided to go forward with something like this. I honestly would have thought better of him – and from the Google+ comments, many others do too L