[...] for instance were claims about the source of their data for Linkscape. Sebastian covered it and did Michael (actually quite a [...]

Thanks.

I’m the CEO of 80legs. This article came across my desk, and it’s certainly raised a few eyebrows over here. Please contact me directly with any additional details you think might be useful.

Thanks,
Shion

Of course that’s not retroactive, so it won’t remove pages that have already been crawled by 008.

And unlike Google webmaster tools, you can’t request URLs to be removed, because the results from their crawl are provided to the user in the form of a CSV which will be downloaded and processed separately.

No idea if that helps block moz tho. If they’ve been lying since the beginning about where the data comes from, then there’s no way of knowing whether or not any of the sources listed are real or just anti-information chaff they tossed out there to keep people from knowing what’s what. Still, good to know about 80legs. It would be nice, since they supposedly allow people to design their own crawls, if pages fetched under the direction of a particular client also identified that client via the useragent, and allowed blocking of them specifically.

80legs is powered by Plura, a grid computing system, which uses idle PCs to do the crawling (Similar to the seti @home project).

The useragent is 008 so I believe if you want to prevent 80legs and their users/clients from crawling your site you can add this to your robots.txt

user-agent: 008
Disallow: /

Meanwhile the whole deal ends up making moz nice money, getting moz some followers who swear up and down with/ and by them, and giving credibility to a group wherein the credibility seems dramatically undeserved.

Man, you should get an investigative reporting award for this story.

Meanwhile it looks to me like sphinn, SEL, and Moz have some explaining to do.

[...] Follow-up post from Michael VanDeMar. Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape [...]

Thanks for helping to clarify how this got re-awakened, and for that perfectly awesome part where you busted SEOMoz for injecting the alibi into the already closed Sphinn article.

I began writing my own article on the topic of SEO industry people being sheep to slaughter last night, but now I don’t know if it’s worth the bother given your excellent article.

Personally, I don’t care if anyone labels any of us as being jealous of Rand or moz in general because that’s people who are either unwilling or unable to see the reality you’ve so eloquently described. And more likely, it’s just coming from people who have put them on the pedestal, just like Tiger Woods fans.

Bottom line here is I don’t trust SEOMoz tools or any other similar tools from any company. Heck I only give enough value to Google’s tools to just be a baseline reference and nothing more.

If people aren’t willing to put in the true footwork that it takes to get quality results without such tools, then I say good for them – suckers, every one. Sheep to slaughter. Making others wealthy on hyped nonsense.

And as far as the refusal of the SEOMoz team to allow blocking of their data, that either confirms they don’t have their own data, which would invalidate their claims, or that they’re just another corporate sham willing to disrespect the very community they profit from.

About the post: W-O-W

1. Awesome investigative blogging. I do not understand what idiot still thinks they can pull one like that on you.

2. Holy crap. Why is it so hard to be straightforward? Why? Majestic is doing it and i have never heard one complaint about them. Just learn from your fucking comptetitors, for goodness sake.