Danny Sullivan (a.k.a. The Godfather to those of us in the SEO realm) messed up, kind of.

In a post he OK's for the Search Engine Land a couple days ago titled, "Get A Free Link From Wired" they basically outline how to get yourself a free link on the wired.com site. I especially love the "don't be too evil" note which implies that some amount of evil is OK.

Now I'm going to note here before I go on that WIRED IS MODERATED - that's why they don't use the rel=nofollow. It shouldn't and can't really be sp@mmed and you're only wasting your time and everyone else's trying to. This was an oversight in the first article.

Danny today published an apology to wired and to the SEO community. It appears that the post got quite the attention from a number of SEO's including (of course) Doug Heil (Mr. My-White-Hat's-Whiter-Than-Yours-Except-When-I'm-Trying-To-Get-My-Way). It's true the post is a but questionable (as I said ... the "don't be too evil" quote leaves some room) but let's be honest - we all make errors in judgement. I posted a blog about rel=nofollow carrying weight. To me it was an interesting test. The next thing I knew I read a blog on another site, "Blogspam works but only in large amounts" written about the test. Not really what I had in mind.

So let's all forgive Danny the oversight and remember, at worst is was some great unintentional (?) link baiting. At best, it got us all talking and pointed out to Wired an issue wither their system that should probably be addressed (maybe rel=nofollow until it's moderated?)

Good luck to both parties.

You can read more about the hoop-la here.