USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

The last few weeks have shown a dramatic decline of community participation in the popular social sharing site, Digg. The demise was noticed when Digg stop receiving over 40 million unique visitors to its site every month after its redesign. Visitors from the US declined by 26% and visitors from the UK by about 34%. Because of this extreme user decline, it currently only takes about 200 Digg users to get a story on the top 10.

Digg is beginning to stabilize the decline and has added many features that its visitors have asked for, but the overall activity level of people still visiting the site is noticeably down as well. What are users looking for, and how can user voting sites like Digg survive?

Continuing Forward

Digg’s redesign took about 18 months to finish and it was only in beta testing for two months. The preparations for the site obviously fell short for what was needed. Digg’s VIP of Product, Keval Desai stated, “We had a game plan, and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better.”

The complaints that they received indicated to Digg that they still had passionate users who are loyal to the site and want things to be fixed. Now, how will they regain the users that they once had before this fiasco?

Keeping in mind the average user and how they think and maneuver, Digg and other voting sites must keep up with the demand and trends that users are expecting. Digg is still trying to meet the needs of its users and publishers large and small who make the site what it is. Even though the redesign has caused a lot of upset and backlash, Digg has recently begun to see a slow increase in user activity again. Making changes according to the habits and desires of its users has helped Digg start to gain more traffic again, though slowly.

Changing With the Times

Another voting site, Sphinn.com, has gone in a different direction that may gain better acceptance than the commotion Digg’s redesign caused. Sphinn noticed a trending decrease in voting coupled with a tendency to “game” the voting system. As a solution, instead of letting users vote for the best articles and stories on the site, Sphinn has gotten rid of voting all together. They hope to bring discussions back to the forefront by letting users add comments and suggestions to stories and articles that have been published. This allows the user to have more of a say in what is being published, without forcing the voting model. This concept could be one direction for other voting sites to take.

Concluding Thoughts

With the ever-growing trend of users desiring greater personal expression online, we might see more discussion groups popping up as user participation models continue to evolve. The ability to discuss issues separately from submitting articles has been widely popular and seems to be coming to the forefront to meet the user demands. Perhaps other voting sites might head in this direction by providing users the ability to voice their opinion in different ways other than voting. Only time will tell what will truly happen to these voting sites, and for now, users have different options to choose from to express their opinions.

There has been a debate flaring up recently. It isn’t a new debate, but with some heads of the industry taking a stand on one side or another, it’s beginning to be talked about more than usual. The discussion is about exactly how much of an effect social websites have on an SEO campaign. It isn’t difficult to see that social networking/bookmarking definitely has some effect when it comes to exposure and branding, but what about actual SEO efforts?

Some SEO companies are now selling campaigns that include social networking as part of the overall package, explaining that it effects SEO in such a way that it needs to be a part of the overall effort.

Others in the industry are on the other side of the debate and say that social accounts have a minimal effect on actual SEO. These people say marketers should stick to more traditional SEO in their campaigns. These professional don’t argue the idea of exposure, but say that the social accounts aren’t worth the effort if your concern is strictly SEO.

At USASEOPros, we have numerous social accounts all over the Internet. As an SEO company, it’s important to at least test the waters and see for yourself before you go listening to other people. Our findings seem to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to this discussion. There are definitely some benefits to be had when using social accounts for SEO, but it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as some other companies may try to make it out to be.

Social accounts are great for a number of reasons: they can increase brand exposure, bring in new people to see what you have to offer, and can even get you a few fans. As far as regular SEO goes, social accounts do have an effect, but traditional SEO is still a very important. Social accounts aren’t a replacement for traditional SEO, they are a compliment to it.

Social accounts can be tool to help a website gain more links. If you post links to a good article or something interesting on a site, there’s a chance other people will link to it as well, and more links means more search engine power. In the same respect, there are some social bookmarking sites that have the potential to give you some good SEO juice if enough people vote on your link submission. As long as you produce things people want to see, social sites can be a useful tool for SEO. Otherwise, it may just be a good way to get exposure and do some reputation management.

If you’re curious and want to sign up for some sites that may be good to test out some of the facts of this debate, we’ve posted a blog with the eight most important social sites for marketing on our company site.

Also, here’s some video of professionals discussing social networking and marketing. The first part is embedded, the rest can be found on YouTube.