With Threadwatch shutting down, it’s been hard to find a place where search engine marketers can get together and shoot the breeze. However, I think Sphinn is a suitable replacement for Threadwatch. Sphinn may not be as edgy as Threadwatch, but it’s still a fun place to hang out.

What Is Sphinn?

Sphinn is a Digg-style social media voting site for search engine marketers. It was started by Danny Sullivan, one of the most knowledgeable and experienced journalists in the search industry.

9 Reasons Why I Like Sphinn

I live and breath SEO. I love learning more about the search industry especially tips and tricks. Sphinn does a pretty good job of aggregating useful, interesting articles about SEO.

Sphinn has over 1,000 users and many of the users are experts in SEO.

The signal-to-noise ratio has been pretty good. There’s a lot of great content being submitted.

SEO newbies are welcome.

Sphinn drives a healthy amount of traffic for a new site.

The outbound links don’t have the nofollow attribute.

You can stalk other users. This means you follow your favorite users as they submit and sphinn (vote for) stories. If they stalk you back, you become each other’s friends.

Sphinn has a wide variety of categories that cover the SEO landscape pretty well. For example, domaining and affiliate marketing are both sub-categories (under online marketing). Also, social media gets its own top-level category.

My Favorite Sphinn Stories So Far

Linking To Wikipedia Is lazy
This was a great reminder to stop linking to Wikipedia unless I absolutely have no choice. (Don’t link to Wikipedia. Early this year, it added the nofollow attribute to every one of its outbound links.)

Your Stories Never Go Popular Because Your Personal Marketing Plan Sucks
This is a good kick in the rear for many search marketers including myself. Personal marketing is often neglected by many of us. However, Wolf-Howl shows us how important it is to market yourself. Great read. I wrote this blog post, Underrated SEO Skill: Being Social, because I realized I wasn’t marketing myself very well.

Digg Is Subtracting Votes
More editorial manipulation by the big techy news portal.

How To Determine If A Link Passes Link Juice
This is a great article especially if you buy links. Are those links actually passing link value?

Top 25 SEO Blogs
Make sure these are on your RSS reader. One day Smart SEO Blog will be there. :)

By the way, I learned about Sphinn through SEOmoz.

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