Late last week, Danny Sullivan launched Sphinn, the search engine industry's own social news & networking site, with remarkably little fanfare. However, despite the relatively covert launch, the site itself has some fairly exceptional functionality and a very fast learning curve. And, if that wasn't enough, one of the top stories right now is on the laziness of linking to Wikipedia (which makes my heart happy):
Sphinn isn't the kind of social site that's going to fizzle out and become unpopular in a few weeks (unlike John Battelle's sad stab at the subject). The dedicated community at Sphinn is already apparent with lots of submissions, registrations and networking. To make this easy, I'll list the top 10 reasons (yep, in list format) why you, as a professional in the search world, should be registered at and contributing to Sphinn on a daily basis:
#10 - You Can "Stalk" Your Friends
Stalking is a very cool feature at Sphinn that lets you monitor what others are submitting, "Sphinning" and blogging about. The impressively advanced profile system means that you can watch your SEO "idols" in all sorts of spooky, fun ways.
#9 - Early Adopters Have a Chance to Stand Out
Since Sphinn is new, active members have a chance to get noticed at the site. Participate heavily and everyone in the search world will soon know your name, or at least your handle.
#8 - Content Currently Only Needs 10-20 Votes
I'm not suggesting you should game the system - I suspect Danny and crew are watching that very closely. However, I would say that it's remarkably easy to get content in front of a lot of important eyeballs and that probably won't be the case for long.
#7 - Referral Traffic is Already High
SEOmoz received around 100 unique visits from Sphinn last week - remarkable considering the overlap between the audiences (and the fact that the story we made popular for wasn't particularly engaging).
#6 - High Profile & Authority Bloggers Are Covering the Material
From Philip Lensen to Matt Cutts to Gary Price and Aaron Wall, the community at Sphinn couldn't be more valuable or influential. I expect that SEOmoz will regularly discuss content on the site, as will many other high authority sites and blogs that will provide link love.
#5 - Live Links
Danny says that they may be going away (or move to a system that measures participation and trust like SEOmoz), but for now, it's open season on grabbing some juicy links.
#4 - No Bury Brigade
Since search marketers despise the anti-SEO bury brigades at sites like Digg, you can rest assured that content won't be buried simply for being self-promotional or "created as linkbait" so long as it's also valuable to the audience.
#3 - Great Material Is Rising to the Top
Looking through the 100 or so stories that have been made popular so far, the material is quite excellent. Matt McGee's Followed Links at Wikipedia, Vanessa Fox giving kudos to her old team at Google on the webmaster alerts and Todd Malicoat's post on Reputation Management are excellent examples.
#2 - Submissions Are Judged on Merit
There's no second-guessing intent or marketing background on Sphinn. We all know why we're participating - we love great marketing content and we love the ability to get it in front of other people's eyes (and earn their links). Content on Sphinn gets judged fairly, without biased, SEO-is-the-root-of-all-evil tinted glasses.
#1 - It's Ours
Search marketers have been clammoring for a popular alternative to Digg for many months. Now that it's here, we need to make the most of it, or we'll have only ourselves to blame. Just think of the possibility - if we all contribute and participate at Sphinn and help to spread the site's message, we can earn the attention of the tech media that's been going wild over Facebook and Digg and LinkedIn for the past year. That validation is going to make the trust of the search marketing field in general skyrocket amount the cogniscenti of Silicon Valley (and beyond) - a very, very good thing. And besides, we need to face the fact that getting on Digg just isn't as fun as it used to be.
For those who aren't quite sure how the site works or what to do there, a few posts have already been authored on the subject. First, read this brief intro to Sphinn and Danny's latest tips on using the site. If you're still skeptical, I'd strongly urge you to have a look at the list of members. Although there aren't yet thousands of people, the names you do see are the "linkerati" of the search world. That's enough to put me convince me that getting a story popular on Sphinn is going to be incredibly valuable - even if you don't earn the links, you're going to be getting invaluable branding, akin to being mentioned on any of the high profile search industry sites.
If you need more prodding, remember this, by clicking over to Sphinn from SEOmoz, you'll make up for the horrible things that Rebecca said about him last week.
p.s. If you'd like to find my profile, you can do so here - randfish. And, if you'd like to "Sphinn" this story, you can do that here.
Thanks for the very kind review, Rand!
Chris, well, I posted a story at 5am Monday morning my time in the UK last night. That work ethic enough :)
For those who don't know, Danny makes me look like a 20-hour-a-week intern. He sleeps 4-5 hours a night, sees the family 30 minutes out of every month and generally puts in more hours towards Third Door (his new company which encompasses Sphinn, SearchEngineLand, the SMX conferences & the Search Marketing Now podcast) than any human being could reasonably be expected to.
Not that I'm impressed or anything... :)
BTW - For those who do have suggestions, there's a feature wishlist where you can have your say. I think that's probably something we'll add at SEOmoz in the near future, as well.
Said by the boy who spent the evening drinking, then returned home at 1am to BLOG.
Solid work Rand!
Very excited about any project Danny heads up.
Looking forward to a great community. :)
Removes the writers block ;)
Although, also illustrates the need for a brilliant product opportunity... the blog-alyzer
;)
Sphinn.com is powered by Pligg. I don't know if there is much room for special requests for improvement. I signed up just recently and noticed that the site is very slow. Does anybody else had the same problems?
Also do not forget that there are other social networking sites for internet marketers. BUMPzee! for example, which started out as a social network/blogger community/blog reader for affiliate marketers and was then extended to allow the creation of any type of community you want within the platform. The SEO/SEM community for example covers already 103 Blogs with over 8,000 entries.
The more the merrier I guess, at least does it provide choice and will cause each platform to develop further to the excitement of us users.
This is really exciting. It's clear that Sphinn will be a big part of any search marketers daily roundup from here on out.
I wouldn't have even known for weeks to come, had it not been for Rand and his faithful sidekick SEOmoz. Thanks team!
Actually, I think Rand is SEOmoz's sidekick, and not the other way around. :)
Of course, my mistake. :)
I had seen this mentioned on a few other blogs but generally use SEOmoz as my yardstick - sure I'll have a look at things that get mentioned on other sites, but if SEOmoz says it's good, then I'm usually on-board pretty quickly.
Two thumbs-up to Danny ... and to Rand for putting together a good personal testimonial for the site.
With so much advertising, affiliate links, buzz and hype, a non-sponsored personal referral goes a long way.
I read seoMOZ every day, and between the blog and the youMOZ section there is always something useful (and/or entertaining) to be gleaned... I suspect that Sphinn will also become a daily destination for me. I also expect to see plenty of 'magnetic headlines' on the front page...
Great info Rand. I just signed up. :)
Great summary of sphinn, Rand!!!
Haha, I am such a N00b. I just found sphinn about 3 days ago. Sigh!
Great site and some good post on there too.
Being new to this community this was very helpful!
I just found a few weeks ago a new social news site, I like it so I'm posting there and it's ok, it's not as big as other social news sites that we know but I like it.
Well my point is that everyday are more and more of this sites.
i just got an account. looks promising lolz yea!
Great Post Rand. I'm starting to list my blog posts on here as well. check out my blog at https://www.webtalentseo.com
I feel too glad after loging in seomoz.org. seomoz.org is wonderful platfom to convay our emotion and submit our heart touching story.
I am a regular visitor of sphhin.com. i try to read many seo related article(story) in it and sphinn, which i like most. Unfortunetelly before some time I added different seo related story. Due to this reason sphinn.com had baned me that's why I have to create another login account. But now I give more importance to seo related stories. I want to become forever visitors of sphinn.com as well as seomoz.org.
Would you like me to add your regular visitor and commenter.
Great Info. Thanks for pointing a way to sphinn things up to your advantage.
It will be an excellent source to search through looking for past articles that are still very valuable. I'm just not sure about signing up for another social meda site / account based site. I alreday have enough accounts to check when I get to work in the morning. (I always do SEOmoz first though!)
It looks nice. In particular I like the gathering of handles across sites / platforms, but I worry that when another site comes out that also does that, I'll have to add every new site into two places, then when every site does that, I'll have to update everything, everywhere...!
Sphinn holds lots of promise, and like SEOmoz, provides a unique and different approach.... I'd say spin but that would be too obvious. Part social marketing, part networking, part news, it looks like Danny is trying to take the best of Digg, Reddit type sites and add in a LinkedIn or FastPitchOnline.
There are still some bugs to work out, but that's to be expected, and what better audience to help idnetify them but also offer up ideas for improvement.
Adding in handles/usernames from other key industry sites to your profile is an additional interesting feature as well, and perhaps something we'll start to see more off.
Best of all though, it provides another tight, niche specific arena for SEO/Ms to interact, communicate, and network.
I went to "sphinn" this story and it already had been submitted. So I clicked on the View this story and Vote link and it searches, but I can't even find the story in the search results.
Maybe Danny needs your work ethic of posting this at 1:25 am on a Monday morning. :)
Hopefully, it'll put an end to the problem of getting great SEM content being unnoticed.
Another thing that plagues the minds of the readers is what kind of link bait will SEMs will be imposing upon their peers. And somehow, I think that obvious Sphinn-bait (first mention of the phrase, yay) will not be voted upon, if it is of average quality.
For now, only exceptional content gets to the homepage (including Vanessa's cats), except my recent post about expert articles.
It's amazing to me how many of these social networking sites can pop up and gain popularity.
I never really got into MySpace but almost had to join Facebook to keep up with all my friend & colleagues.
The social sites like Facebook are a great way to interact but I always felt like they were missing something. They seemed more for entertainment than valuable information.
I'm excited about Sphinn and look forward to the content our "elite" community can generate.
Keep it up all!
I registered to Sphinn last week.
looks like it has lots of potential. It has a feeling of an old school forum, where people are actually there to contribute and discuss topics.
I like that Danny and the editors are willing to rewrite headlines if they think a topic is hot and it could do better.
I publiched one article myself, in a no traffic sub forum (search tips) and got a tiny bit of traffic and a tiny bit of love.
But I think the article might hang around in there for a while so it may do well over time
It's so niche it's beautiful!
As we all know, Digg used to be niche too. At least with Sphinn we'll always find what we're looking for (even 2-3 years down the road), and we'll always be welcome there.
Thanks for postingt about this site. I've been so busy the last few weeks, I get all my SEO news from this blog. I'm off to create an account at Sphinn now!
Good job w/ teh Stalking feature. Great idea.
I just signed up! We will see how it turns out, but I think it has TONS of opportunity. Waiting for the no-follows to come thoug, too many people will try to game the system.