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Thursday, August 23, 2007
In today's SES San Jose panel on User-Generated Content (moderated by Rebecca Lieb and co-presenting were Matt McGee and Lee Odden), I looked at a number of case examples, and proposed a checklist for any UGC site trying to achieve breakout to serious popularity.
If you work through the logic, UGC 1.0 sites like TripAdvisor had a high-level SEO strategy that was simple (good content, lots of it, in a long tail of many search queries, that people like and use) and not risky (ain't playing head games with the algorithms). The site feeds Google, it doesn't compete with it.
A number of other hot examples today qualify as having said potential. There are also many risks. But something like Yelp has a decent shot at full breakout; on the other hand, I now worry a bit that NowPublic has no sound SEO strategy and may struggle to get traffic.
Others are potentially isolating themselves because they're unlikely to garner the needed boost from massive amounts of free organic search referrals. Again, working through the logic I think Mahalo is in trouble. They are competing directly with Google. Their crowdsourcing model is clever but appears to not scale enough to feed Google and users what they need.
So Rich Skrenta, earlier this week (knows of what he speaks, obviously) succinctly put the question: "Is it really possible to do dmoz/about 2.0 and have a go of it?" Skrenta's skeptical.
I agree with Rich, but might take an even more extreme position. The amount of SEO traffic to achieve TripAdvisor-like breakout is not going to be available to Mahalo, and there is absolutely nothing on the horizon that would appear to suggest they'll have platform advantages that would exempt them from needing an SEO strategy. As clever as it may sound, Calacanis' model is basically that he just founded a search engine to compete with Google, rather than a specialized site that would feed Google. This is why it is unlikely to work.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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