SEO BLOG

Update: The issue has been resolved already, seobook.com is reinstated.

While I enthusiastically joined Mixx and participated eagerly since then one thing strikes me as more than unusual: It seems that one of the most renown SEO authorities, Aaron Wall of SEO Book has his domain seobook.com banned at Mixx! I wanted to submit his hugely popular SEO Guide for bloggers which has been bookmarked at del.icio.us 1156 times as of now and it’s “not valid“.

When I join a community and spend some substantial amount of time on supporting it, filling it with content and basically working for free for it I do not like to encounter such strange surprises.

I assume it’s the Beta that strikes here again, as there are apparently some other issues right now, e.g. I can’t vote in FireFox 1.5 and Mixx does not work in Opera 9. It certainly does not make sense to ban one of the best SEO sites whatsoever.

This is exactly where Digg has failed among others, in differentiating between worthless SEO spam and valuable SEO content that empowers bloggers and webmasters to succeed online.

I hope Mixx won’t follow the same path of failure.

The screenshot above shows the submit dialog of Mixx. If you attempt to submit a page from seobook.com you get a

Sorry, the URL you are attempting to submit is not valid on our system.

To double check I used the homepage URL and it did not work either. As the URL does not seem in any ways atypical to me or broken, StumbleUpon for instance can’t handle some URLs, like not optimized Joomla ones e.g. it must be a mistake. It sure is interesting how this glitch happened. Did someone file an abuse report and seobook.com was automatically banned?

Disclosure: I’m a SEO Book affiliate and have complained in the past about the poor sales of it on my site.