There's a big opportunity to solve this problem. I've always thought that a combination of expert reviews, combined with user reviews and those found on other reliable sources (Yelp, Amazon, etc) that were weighted via an algorithm could provide a more fair "review score" for products and services. Just like anything, the more data you get, the easier it is to provide a fair quantitative assessment.

"Good SEO is targeted towards computers rather than humans."

You're obviously not very good at SEO or else you'd know this is completely untrue.

He mentions his product in the beginning of the post. It had nothing to do with the post. Does that make the mention grey-hat PR?

Seriously...

The guy took the time to write a solid post about his experience. An experience that will help him out.

For free.

Least he can do to reward himself (and us accept) is the use of the most advantageous anchor texts for links in his post.

www.wordtracker.com is $59/month

There is a difference between want and need. 42Floors WANTS the best and brightest, but really only NEEDS solid players to be successful.

That said, if you only WANT for solid players, you usually end up with crappy ones.

Justin, as a business owner, you are not Yelps customer. Yelp customer, or at least the one they care about, is really the people who use the site.

I predict the SEO circle jerk will out them soon for begging, borrowing and or buying links. Way to blow up their spot.

It's not going to matter. Godaddy already has about 100x the external links that NameCheap does (according to SEOmoz[1] and Majestic SEO[2]). If NameCheap moved up, it was for reasons other than external links.

1. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.godaddy...

2. https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink-...

GoDaddy also has north of 50 million domains registered versus 3 million for Namecheap. If I understand correctly, GoDaddy doesn't make any (or very little) of domain sales, it's the other services like hosting, email, etc that generate the revenue.

How much GoDaddy charges for domains has little to do with their SEO ranking.

They do use it as a loss-leader because most people starting a new site search for domain names over hosting when starting out.

sounds like someone doesn't have the first clue about running a business, at least from a financial standpoint.

There will always be someone bigger, faster, stronger, smarter and more successful.