Lately, I have seen some interesting posts and activity on the blogs and YOUmoz posts, which kind of geared me into writing this post.

But before you go any deeper, remember I claim right to the disclaimer and it applies to the below – the ideas and suggestions are mine and not a reflection of anyone else  – they're simply observations and wanderings of an idle mind.  I am not an authority, but as SEOmoz is kind enough to allow members to post their thoughts, I felt it's only right I put mine up, and gauge your reactions and criticisms. By the way, I welcome and encourage creative criticism, so please, be brutal ;-).

Thumbs Down System

I applaud the fact that this ability to vote down a comment exists, yet sometimes its use confuses me. I can highlight plenty of examples where a thumbs down wasn’t deserved or made no sense. However, out of respect for the people who have received these, I decided against adding the links to those comments.

Respecting the freedom of speech encouraged by the site, I would still encourage users to specify why they have thumbed down a comment or a post – I always leave an explanation or counter argument – after all, if I don’t know what you don’t agree with, how do I address it?  Maybe the person voting down doesn’t want their identity known, which is also fine. Maybe we could have an option when you thumb down where a box appears for you to anonymously add your comment. This would be anonymous to everyone, except for SEOmoz staff, so that inappropriate comments can be noted.

Spam marker on comments!

Another bugbear is spam – once again, I am glad Rand et al leave these on and let the community vote them down. But maybe a spam marker should introduced as another choice to the comment? This will allow naïve users/ noobies to identify that the community suspects that the post is spam.

Free membership

I think in response to question 3 of this post, promotion of the fact that it is possible to gain free premium membership should be increased. It would encourage more participation – at the moment the main blog has over 18 000 readers, but less than 550 members have commented / participated more than 10 times since registering. Don’t get me wrong, I love lurkers--once in a while they will drop in their 2 cents and raise excellent points.

YOUmoz personal profiles

Vanessa Fox recently wrote about reputation management you may be missing. To be honest, I was very impressed with the post, and realised that she is right. Keeping that in mind, we all know how strong SEOmoz is on search engines…results from a search for my moniker “rishil” has SEOmoz at number four on Google from a possible 16100 results. Searching for “rishi lakhani search marketing” -  a query my new clients have told me that they've run  - shows the SEOmoz result at number three.

That’s great – I have a very good profile showing what I do and matches with what I say to them, and shows I have active participation. This is useful, as I have been too lazy to start a blog, but even then, I doubt my blog would be seen as authoritatively as the SEOmoz results, even if I can rank higher, which is easy to do for my name. ;-)

So I have a few observations for this page:

RSS feeds from personal blogs

I would find it very useful if users could import their latest posts as an RSS feed on their profile page. That way we can see at a glance what the users are writing about and whether their sites worth a visit.

Ability to add a range of URLs such as Facebook and other public profiles

Since most of us have more than one website and online profiles and participation, I wonder if it would be worth allowing us a larger number of URLs to add on there (and for those with over 100 points to be able to specify which URL they want the nofollow to be taken off).

Profile URL

This one's pure vanity, but I would love for the profile URL to have my name instead of a user number, as it looks good in SERPs.

Thumbs up/down tracking

I would love to be able to see where users (and me) got thumbed up and down. At the moment I don’t think there is a way to see on which comments and posts we got thumbed down.

Features for members…

From a member's point of view, there are a couple of things I would like to see added:

I would like higher thumbs up for article submission and even higher thumbs up for promotion to the main blog – it takes much more time and effort to put these together than a comment  and seems unfair to mark it with just one thumbs up.

Tracking of all comments - or at least the last 50? I make quite a few comments, and so do many of the active members, sometimes it's easy to lose track of what comments I made. I wish there was a way to see more than the most recent few.

YOUmoz blogs

Once again, this may encourage user participation and address the variance between subscriber to YOUmoz and the main SEOmoz blog. Currently, it is 400 versus 18,000; I wish the YOUmoz section could be promoted to gain more readers! There are some valuable insights in there. If I felt I could get my thoughts to that big of an audience, I would definitely submit more information.

So maybe you can encourage recognition of YOUmoz entries by:

Promoting new entries on the main blog navigation?

It would be good to see a list of the latest YOUmoz articles on the main blog left navigation. This may encourage more people to read them.

Now that brings me to an end of my mental meanderings, but let me and others know what you think, and if there are suggestions, critiques, and comments, well – make them below!