Brett_Tabke - 12:12 pm on Jul 13, 2009 (gmt 0)

We hear you esllou, the admins take very seriously the posting of stories to the home page. It is not an easy thing to do to filter the stories. Most days, we take the top 3-4 stories for the homepage and go with it.

We are regularly "snipped" at from inside the search engines themselves. Trust me when I say, they don't hold our audience in the high regard that we do. We often get emails from se reps lamenting that we are getting too dark a color of hat. We used to be viewed as a community to be engaged in discussion with - that died with the metaphorical passing of GoogleGuy [webmasterworld.com]. Now we are most often viewed as a tool to be used [webmasterworld.com] for market research - not a community to be fostered.

We also get the occasional rant mail from white hatters that we are the internets den-of-ill-seo-repute and need to support se guidelines more than we do.

Then there are emails from folks like you, that think we have become too much setools. I know that feeling. We really try to seed other articles and topics as well, but in the end - we take the most popular ones we find in the forums.

Lets be honest - for 5-7 years, we have all been riding the G wave as it has come through. On the positive side, I think - like alot of internet pundits - has peaked. What's next?

>we're just helping to feed the beast, aren't we?

That opinion comes up from time to time. I like that it comes up because it keeps us conscious of the fact that there are two sides to this issue and if each side keeps poking us - then we must have found a good balance.

Google controls (depending on which ppopular stat service u read) about 65-75% of the searches on the internet. However, most webmasters I have talked too, the figure is probably closer to 85-90% in the real world (we run 92% of our referrals from Google on this site). Most webmasters don't even consider Yahoo or Bing when optimizing and targeting content.

So ya - we hear the All-Google-All-The-Time refrain, but I would say the internet is All-Google-All-The-Time and we must reflect that.