I would just like to show that this Seomoz bashing article doesn’t make any sense.

“In context, Rand is basically advicing you all to spam the Social Networks like digg, stumble, and may others. Those are so called Natural Links in his point of view.”

Apparently Syed doesn’t know much about social networking/bookmarking sites. Spamming the social networks does not help your rankings because they are almost all nofollowed and you have to have a very good page/article to get noticed. Rand has never called social networking links “Natural Links.” The links resulting from having high quality articles are natural links. Rand uses paid and asked for links to gain rankings. You can spam all day long on the social bookmarking sites and it won’t help your rankings a bit (you would probably get banned.) In fact Rand posted about how Social Media Manipulation is Running Rampant.

“Does SEOMoz follows Terms of Services of other Websites ?”

Almost every SEO tool on any site is breaking some terms of service of some company (usually Google or Yahoo). It is against Google’s Terms of Service to scrape their results. Almost all ranking checkers scrape the data. If this makes Rand bad than you might as well say the same about most of the other SEO tools providers. Rand did say that they are going to fix the tool so it updates everyday.

Rand Fishkin almost never mentioned socengine because it is an old project that he doesn’t work on anymore. He never said that links from it were worth anything or that it is better than Aviva Directory. It was just his opinion that Aviva Directory was under a Google penalty. Apparently Aviva was not to disturbed by his post or they would have removed their list of strongest directories that are ordered by PageStrength.

I will say I was disappointed that they limit their tools to only premium members. But just because he decided, after a year of having the tool for free, that he wanted to charge doesn’t make him greedy or a scammer. Free tools cost alot or money to run, especially one that uses so much bandwidth.