Changes at Spider-food

Brad Enslen recently resigned as a moderator at Spider-food. I am the last to hold down the fort.

J.K. Bowman started Spider-food in 2000. He was, like me, what Danny Sullivan calls a second generation SEO. J.K. and I met through JimWorld and after I had left that community J.K. enticed me to come back out and participate in his forum.

It was a pretty good relationship, although I did irritate a few people when I became ill in early 2004. I’ve struggled with some chronic conditions and when I’m not feeling well I tend to pull no punches. So I took a hiatus for about a year but came back to Spider-food in early 2005.

J.K. had a great moderation team at one point: Digital Ghost, Brad Enslen, SEOMike (Mike Waltman), Crash (Kelly Beil), Dan Short. Dudes, these people rocked. They didn’t always agree with me on technique and tactics, but they brought a lot of insight and experience to their SEO discussions. And J.K. was the man. His tutorials at Spider-food were some of the best in the business.

Alas! J.K. has lost his passion for search engine optimization. He has moved on to other projects, other dreams. He is active and motivated when I speak to him but he’s just not into online marketing any more. A few of us have been keeping Spider-food going partly out of sentiment for an old community and partly out of respect for what J.K. accomplished in the past.

With Brad’s departure I had to ask J.K. what he intends to do with Spider-food. He’s decided to let it go. He’s also offered to let me take it over.

That’s quite a responsibility. I’ve been operating Web forums since 1998 and I know fully well what is involved in building a great community. It takes time, passion, and leadership. Of course, I’m up to my eyeballs in SEO projects these days. I’ve already pulled out of the handful of SEO forums I used to hang in and I don’t comment on other SEO blogs as much as I used to.

Managing an SEO forum will really tax my personal resources. Still, 1st Query has decided not to take it on (I had to give them right of first refusal for contractual reasons). So it falls to me to decide what to do.

Spider-food once ranked highly on all the search engines for various SEO terms. J.K. took down all the old tutorials because the advice was dated. The forums have been under a mysterious Google penalty which, I think, may be due to porn spammer link drops, although the moderators have cleaned up everything we’ve seen. Despite the Google penalty Spider-food still gets a tremendous amount of traffic.

I’ll be working with J.K. over the next week or two to complete the transition. He’s disabled active posting for now. I have no time table for when the forums will come back to life but I’ll try to do it soon. And though I cannot require or compel my staff to participate in the forums I’ll ask them to give it some thought. Like most SEOs they prefer to lurk more than anything else.

I’ll also be looking for new moderators. I’ve already approached one person who has agreed to help out.

I feel like Elrond coming back to Rivendell at the end of the Second Age. Gil-Galad is gone and the high Elven civilization has all but collapsed. I’m not yet ready to pass over Sea. I think Spider-food can still be a great resource for the SEO community, one where people will not be allowed to flame each other, one where moderators will not be allowed to edit other people’s posts in order to make those people look stupid, one where moderators will not be allowed to bully and harrass people with whom they disagree.

The moderators will be professional, courteous, and helpful. That’s the kind of moderation staff I recruited for SF-Fandom and that’s the kind of moderation staff I want for Spider-food. Like the moderators J.K. used to have.

The new team has some big shoes to fill. I’m looking forward to the challenge.