News hit me earlier this evening that my old favourite SEO forum has now been sold for USD8,655. It has been bought by the owners of SEONews, who will hopefully revive the old brand and build a new Search Engine Optimisation community. Maybe Burger Man can be reincarnated. The sad thing is that the SeachGuild.com database was lost in a hosting mishap, which means that all the good work done over the years has been lost. For those that have been heavily involved in SEO for more than a few years will probably remember the SEO competition for the phrase Nigritude ultramarine. The competition was arranged and monitored by SearchGuild, and details are still on Wikipedia, although there are no longer any references to SearchGuild. For those interested, SearchGuild was the creation of Chris Ridings, who was prominent in the SEO community during the 1990′s and early 2000′s, but has moved on from SEO since then.
As an afterthought, maybe it is time for a new approach to SEO. Chris Ridings started improving the SearchGuild architecture a year ago, to attempt to bring it in line with “Web2.0″ principals, but really maybe a forum is too old fashioned now. A new style of community is needed, something to bring a breath of fresh air into the stuff SEO world.
