At the beginning of every month I'll be highlighting the best content from the previous month. I'll still be doing the weekly roundups (I owe you guys a big one tomorrow), but here's a monthly recap of the best blogs, YOUmoz entries, tools and more.

Best Blog Posts in April 2009

1. Fear and Forgiveness. Rand talks about feelings (whoa whoa whoa, feelings) and forgiving people who have rubbed him the wrong way in the past. It's a post we can all relate to and a nice reminder that maybe we shouldn't hold onto grudges as tightly as we do. 
2. How Google's Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time. Rand shares his opinion on how some of the key factors in Google's ranking algorithm have changed over the past several years.
3. Whiteboard Friday: Domain Trust and Authority. Bookending Rand's Google rankings algo changes post is this WBF video about various issues that can affect your domain's trust metrics and its ability to rank well. 
4. How to Rank Well in Google Products Search & a Big List of Places to Get Reviews. Tom Critchlow represents Team Distilled with pride as he shares some great tips on how to optimize for Google Base and provides potential ranking factors.
5. 21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post. It's just not a Best Of list without, well, a list. Rand shares 21 ways to attract attention to your blog posts.
   

Best YOUmoz Posts in April 2009:

1. SEO Since 1999. James Svoboda goes all VH1 "I Love the Internet" on us and gives a comprehensive history of how search engines, directories, PPC, affiliate program, social media marketing, and more have changed in the last 10 years. 
2. Darren Slatten Sucks - Don't Ever Hire Him. Darren takes an interesting approach to reputation management and says that he doesn't need it; rather, he lets his work speak for itself.
3. How a Site Redesign Increased Traffic By 515%. Whitespark shares the results of a major site redesign with us and includes some really compelling before and after web stats.

Tool Updates and Launches in April 2009:

• We gave the Crawl Test tool a bit of a face lift and improved its functionality. It's also faster and more scalable, so hooray for that! (If you notice anything buggy with it, please contact [email protected].)
• Both Linkscape and Blogscape had updates in our continuous effort to provide you monkeys with accurate, fast and useful tools. Linkscape's index is now the biggest ever, with 44 billion URLs and 475 billion links. We also updated our list of the 500 most important domains on the Internet. 
• We introduced our new juicy link finder, the Link Acquisition Assistant, which is currently beta-ing it up in Labs. This tool returns 121 link acquisition queries based on information you provide about your website, brand and competition.
  
• Oh, and of course, we launched Webfluence at the beginning of the month. ;)

Monthly YOUmoz Contest Winner

Last month I introduced a new feature, our monthly YOUmoz blog theme contest. Each month I'll announce a blog theme and our members can choose to write a YOUmoz post about that theme. At the end of the month I'll pick a winning blog post, and the author will receive a $50 Amazon.com gift card.

April's theme was reputation monitoring and management. We only received two entries (sniffle):

• Darren Slatten Sucks - Don't Ever Hire Him
• My Own Personal Approach to Online Reputation Management

Kudos to DanaDV for giving it a fightin' chance, but I'm going to have to award the prize to Darren Slatten for writing an entertaining, thought-provoking post that takes a different approach to online reputation management. Darren, you goober, you are our very first YOUmoz contest winner. Congratulations!

YOUmoz Theme for May 2009

This month we've added a nifty little banner to the YOUmoz home page that displays the current month's theme. Now you have no excuse--I want to see more entries this month, damnit!

As you can see from the screenshot, our theme for May 2009 is social media marketing. I figure that since Rand has been blogging about SMM a lot lately, it's a good opportunity to keep the conversation going. We already have one entry so far, so stop dilly dallying and submit your post today!