First, let me say I hope this post will be taken in the spirit in which it is intended – to have a little fun with our Moz community and to learn something applicable to almost everything in life – even SEO!

While looking at the SEOmoz Top Ranked Members the other day, I noticed that I’m listed at #19, which is fantastic, especially since bookworm-seo is listed at #20 even though he has more moz points than I do!

At first I thought the system may only update every so often to reshuffle the rank (hell, I don’t know how the damn thing works!). But it stayed the same. Then I saw all the thumbs-down poor bookworm-seo has been hit by and thought maybe that made the difference.

Only davidmihm at #18 has more Moz points and less thumbs-down than Peter “TCSM” Wailes at #17.

The only conclusion I can make is that Premium Members get shafted on the Top Ranked Members list.

…or not.

There are other possibilities like:

• The system does update every so often and I caught it between cycles
• It’s broken
• Rank and Moz Points may be as connected as SERPs and PR
• Something else entirely

I’m just having a bit of fun, though I really would like to know how this all works. I just blindly assumed that the more points you picked up, the higher your rank (probably because it says “The following is a list of SEOmoz members ranked according to their MozPoints” at the top of that page).

How often do we do that with our insights to the search engines? I see this more from SEO newbies than seasoned pros, but sometimes a person will grab a small amount of data and run with it. How many SEO pros still think keyword density is relevant?

The moral is that correlation is not the same as causation. When you spot something odd, avoid drawing any conclusions until you’ve got all the information you can get. You’ll be a better SEO for it and maybe even a better person.

Randall McCarley occasionally posts interesting things at 14th Colony, though he has been too busy lately. In fact, instead of working on this post for SEOmoz, he should have been working on his own sites! Oh well, Merry Christmas Mozzers!