For those of you who have been following SEOmoz for a while I want to take you on a trip down memory lane -- for those who are new a bit of history. Back before YOUmoz there was a stable of non-staff bloggers including EGOL, 2K, Michael Martinez, Guillaume, and GeoffreyF67 (aka Gman).They made up a strong pool of well-spoken people with very different opinions or perspectives on search optimization.

Notably Michael often expressed that links are highly overvalued in “modern’ SEO theory and Gman is public about his spamming and black hattery. Guillaume and 2k both brought perspective of non-US practitioners of SEO. And EGOL has a balanced bigger picture approach to the web.But what happened to them? Since the inception of YOUmoz they have all but disappeared. But their insights are still available to everyone who misses them, or would like to learn more from them.

Gman, Guillaume, and Michael all still blog in other places:

• http://www.lookwhatgmanfound.com
• http://www.go-referencement.org
• http://www.seo-theory.com/wordpress/

EGOL is active on SEOchat and Cre8asiteforums. 2k is more difficult to find, in fact I haven’t found him.

YOUmoz has done some great things, creating a lower barrier for entry for new members to express their thoughts, increased the number of new members, and pushed SEOmoz from blog to niche social media site. But it has also, I feel, narrowed the perspective of the community. Where we used to have a broad range of commentary we now have a largely homogeneous approach, so much so that a recent comment was summarily thumbed down for expressing an opinion that the post didn't offer sufficient information. Whether you agree or disagree it is problematic that one of the strongest responses of thumbs is over a comment that is not particularly hostile. Rand can take professional criticism and I am sure appreciates that people are willing to give honest opinion on his blogs. When they are driven out for expressing themselves you are hurting the community as a whole.

Now that we are more community driven, it falls on our shoulders to bring our best and foster real discussion. I miss many of the old bloggers, but I am sure that the community has enough intelligent people to broaden our discussion again in their absence. Let's make SEOmoz the best place it can be.

Note from Jane: The comment mentioned above was meant to be linked to, but the link did not work. As I'm not sure which comment the author is talking about, anyone who knows which comment this is in reference to is welcome to provide the link...