Seems a lot of people are scared of BigDaddy but I’m liking the looks of it all around. Heads up: 64.233.179.104 is no good anymore. Go for 66.249.93.104 instead.
So Brett Tabke has let the bots back in after a short breakup. Earlier this year I struggled to understand the reasoning for the Disallow : / and it never really made sense. A few weeks ago I finally learned the true story from a friend. Tabke was cloaking Webmasterworld and the cloaked homepage was linking to his SearchEngineWorld.com site. Google came along and warned him about it, Brett said F-U to Google, Google began de-indexing WMW, and Brett disallowed all to cover his ass.
Today I was having a hard time updating my Amazon wishlist so my family can buy me gifts that I actually want. So I decided to get ideas by looking up Amazon wishlists that my friends created. Then it occurred to me that it would be fun to see what folks in the SEO/Search industry wanted in their stocking this Christmas.
Jim Boykin – His wishlist
Jim has a nice list of books including the obligatory Seth Godin “Unleashing the Ideavirus”. Looks like Jim is looking for help executing on ideas and on being a better manager.
Andy Beal – His wishlist
Andy’s wishlist is devoid of business publications. Who would want to read more about search or marketing when you digest as much as Andy does each day? 
Andys’ looking for the perfect colors for his home.
Aaron Wall – His wishlist
Damn Aaron! You win the award for the biggest wishlist with 198 desired items. Looks like Aaron is trying to build on his prior investment success with his Google stocks as well as brush up on his grammar for all that heavy blogging.
Jensense – Her wishlist
Jennifer is a fan of the soap opera All My Children. Come on Jenn! If you’re going to spend an hour watching soaps its gotta be Y&R! We all could use some business tips from Victor.
Matt Cutts – His wishlist
Matt wants to unwind with some heavy riffs (Great choice BTW. Loads of fun.) Also it looks like Mr. Cutts is suffering from disorganization, and has a soft side for his kitty. It’ll be interesting to watch this wishlist and see how many people attempt bribery through Amazon gifts.
Jason Duke – His wishlist
Spammers need gifts too! Looks like Jason is dabbling in a bit of code hacking as well as mind hacking. No surprise there. Did you ever notice how JasonD takes the Matt Cutts approach and avoids the sauce while everyone else is pounding down beers? Big question Jason: SEO for Dummies??!!
Todd Malicoat – His wishlist
Todd shares Aaron’s interest in Al Franken, as well as my desire to pick up The Tipping Point. And it looks like Todd is working on his abs.
Chris Pirillo – His wishlist
Not much insight with this short wishlist. Chris seems to be a big They Might Be Giants fan.
Sergey Brin – His wishlist
Sergey wins the prize for the most expensive item ($10,995.00) on a wish list for some kind of wakeboarding machine that he can cruise around Google lake on.
Jeremy Zawodny – His wishlist
Jeremy is looking for the best strategy to deal with all of his Yahoo stock options and he shares my love for John Cusack movies and David Sedaris humor. BUT Jeremy wins the award for the most interesting item on a wishlist. Looks like Mr. Zawodny wants to learn more about the mysterious workings of the female clitoris. 
Update : Jeremy trimmed back his list including ‘Clitourist’. I didn’t mean to embarrass you too much Jeremy. Anyway, screenshot.
If you are somebody in the search industry and I failed to find your wishlist send me a comment.
Is this a joke or did NickW really sell Threadwatch.org to SEO Book’s Aaron Wall? I feel like I’m taking some serious link bait here but then a quick check of the Threadwatch feed and I see that Nick has indeed posted a message about moving servers. Checking the domain registration I see that its still showing Nick Wilson as the contact.
So what was the price tag?
Update:
Ok, so thanks to the instant gratification of feeds I’ve just seen that Jim Boykin verified it.
When Brett Tabke decided to disallow all search engine bots via robots.txt on Webmasterworld, I was amazed to hear that his reasoning was that rogue bots check the robots.txt and thus by disallowing them they would go away. That hasn’t been my experience on any of my sites. In fact when I write code to scrape the hell out of a site i never include this line:
$handle = fopen(“http://www.somesiteabouttobebangedon.com/robots.txt”, “r”);
I just let loose a slew of asynchronous threads and start chewing.
Good luck to all those poor souls that were using Google for site search on Webmasterworld. Brett claims that there will be a functioning solution in 60 days. However, I hounded him about it over a year ago at Pubcon Las Vegas and he also said it would be ready in 60 days. Again I hounded him about in in the supporters forum and was promised something soon. While I was in Vegas last week for Pubcon November 2005 I also spoke to the programmer hired to take on the task of building a Webmasterworld site search. He said he was planning on a custom flat file approach. Yikes. Reinventing the wheel might take more than 60 days even for Larry Ellison.
On the Other Hand
Perhaps Brett’s real motivation for taking this seemingly ridulous step is to improve the quality of the discussion. The massive flood of newbies to the board has created a level of noise that makes it damn near impossible to have useful conversations like the ones that went on a few years ago. Theres no doubt that the success of NickW’s Threadwatch is due in large part to an exodus of quality posters looking for a quieter place to talk SEO. (Although many factors make TW a great read such as attitude and style of moderation). I started a private, invite only SEO forum a year ago for the same reasons and have found myself visiting WMW very rarely en lieu of Threadwatch and private forums. So maybe banning all bots is Tabke’s last ditch effort to save the original SEO forum from implosion.
