Many of us in the SEO industry bemoaned the decision of Sphinn, the only social news community for search marketers, to remove the voting option. This way a community turned to a completely editorial site. That may be not as bad for for the Sphinn team, instead of fighting spammers and voting rings they can focus on seeking out valuable stories now. On the other hand it has been a huge blow to the
global SEO village: Where can we convene virtually? On the manifold forums, Twitter or Facebook?
This opportunity was quickly seized by some of the most active Sphinn users and prolific social networkers. They created a new social news community for us out of scratch. It’s called SERPd and it seems to work well from the start from the user perspective.
I’ve been using SERPd for a few weeks now and I really like it. It’s not perfect but it offers plenty of useful options and features to enhance your industry news reading experience.
The SERPD team still struggles with some minor design issues and bugs but overall they made many things right already. Let me review these features:
Number of views
SERPd displays the number of views a submission gets. This number does not equal the number of visitors or pageviews you get on your site though. It’s most probably the number of views an item gets on serpd.com itself. Despite this shortcoming this number is very helpful to determine true popularity. You can easily distinguish between artificially voted up links or those that barely made the frontpage at the last minute and the truly successful postings many people click.
Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon integration
SERPd also includes Facebook “likes”, a Twitter button (no number of retweets) and StumbleUpon views of the source page. This way the site is not an island but very much part of a larger social media ecosystem. You can spread the news on those other sites most people take part already.
serpds.us UR Shortener
Another welcome feature is the SERPd owned URL shortener serpd.us – clicking on the “Tweet This!” button will result in the shortening of the URL. Clicking on the short URL will lead to the submission page on SERPd.
Upcoming and latest posts
Right now there you can see upcoming posts (those almost popular or with most votes) and latest posts (those just submitted) in the frontpage sidebar. This is quite helpful to gain a quick overview of the news.
Latest activity
Almost every action gets displayed on the FP as well, be it a vote, a comment or submission, called “bookmark” here. There still seems to be some kind of confusion here between social news and social bookmarking we’re used to from Delicious. SERPd, like Digg, doesn’t make sense as a social bookmarking service. You can’t organize or search your own bookmarks using tags for instance. SERPd is clearly a niche social news site. The latest activity on the frontpage sidebar allows you to follow a short stream of what other people did on SERPd. This helps a lot as the popular items don’t change much by now.
Follow and get followed
You can follow people on SERPd and get followers as well. You can also see the latest activity of the people you follow and your followers too. Unlike on Facebook, Twitter or the new Digg you don’t see a stream of activity but the latest action of each user you follow (or follows you). This way you need to take a close look to see what’s new. Also the people you have followed most recently get shown o the first page then. To see your older friends you need more clicks. While following works better than on Sphinn where it didn’t make much sense at all to me at least it’s not as advanced as I’m used to these days. Hopefully SERPd will expand this concept.
Frontpage and popular stories
There is a great way to determine current and historically popular submissions by ”day, week, month, year, all time” using the according links on top. On the other hand the frontpage has the typical drawback of all social news sites: It’s not always the best content that gets popular but the content most people know about, approve of or understand.
Categories
The categories reflect a traditional spectrum of internet marketing disciplines, ranging from blogging, SEO, SEM, PPC to social media, searching and copywriting. You won’t find some of the modern disciplines like local SEO, mobile SEO, video SEO or viral marketing though.
Issues
The site title of SERPd says “Search Engine Marketing & SEO News”. This does not sound very inclusive. Only SEM/SEO news? What about internet marketing as a whole? Blogging and copywriting has been added later and the broader “social media” is there as well but it seems that most people who are not part of the SEO industry will not feel like taking part. Sphinn at least started with the broader scope of internet marketing as a whole and ended up quite limited to search marketing. The SEO niche might turn too small to gain enough momentum for SERPd.
Will SERPd stand the test of time?
Frontpage based social news sites like Digg, Mixx or Propeller all struggle while the stream based mode of social networking and non-hierarchical link sharing sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) has proven the more popular way of socializing on the Web recently. This is also one of the most important reasons why Sphinn failed.
The frontpage metaphor leads per definition to abuse. You can’t abuse Twitter or Facebook as easily as there is no central hub for the popular links. So you get only popular with your friends and followers not due to a frontpage.
The frontpage as such has been adopted from print. Today we know that there is no real frontpage on the Web. All pages of a site are landing pages and the homepage is just meant to organize information.
Said that and given the issues Sphinn had to deal with SERPd works quite well as of now. It needs more active users to stay afloat though. Right now I’m one of the most active ones just by checking it out two or three times a day. So you have the opportunity to become a valuable user people listen to without too much effort.
Good points. I disagree with the number of views metric though. It can VERY easily be manipulated. I think that serpd can be a great new niche Socical Network for marketers. It’s too early to implement all the necessary features but there are lots of things happening under the hood.
Thanks for the heads up, SERPd seems like a great community and I will definitely be heading there once I post this comment :)
I’m sorry, but “most” in the SEO community did not bemoaned our decision to shift Sphinn to an editorial model. With over 2,000 visitors per day, practically no one complained — and practically no one continues to complain, while our traffic continues just as it had before the shift.
An incredibly tiny number of people actually voted, as we’ve repeatedly said — and that tiny number had a huge proportion of people who were either vote gaming or only voting out of self-interest.
To say that tiny number is “most” of the SEO industry is simply wrong. It wasn’t most of the industry, much less most of the Sphinn readership.
I also don’t get how any of this is a blow to the “SEO village.” Anyone can start a discussion at Sphinn to “convene virtually” if they want, or comment on stories. Or, there remain long-standing forums such as Webmaster World where people have convened virtually. The only blow has been that it’s no longer easy for a tiny number of people to force whatever they want onto the front page of Sphinn, because they have a lot of friends.
I’ve repeatedly said that if SERPD can make the voting model work for them, especially if they get popular which really puts the pressure on spam and maintain quality, that’s great. And I mean that. It just wasn’t something that we found, after 3 long hard years, that worked very well.
I also understand the inevitable need to compare the two sites, even though they have different models. But in fairness, it would be nice if you went back and rereviewed the “new Sphinn,” don’t you think? If you’re going to review the new SERPD, it seems like Sphinn deserves a little equal time.
Vasilis: I haven’t tried to manipulate it so I didn’t know yet ;-) On the other hand when you send a submission to your Twitter followers it’s not manipulation IMHO but it could inflate the pageviews. I have been monitoring the view numbers and they seemed quite accurate to me.
Zarko: You’re welcome.
Danny: As always I feel humbled getting a comment from you on a post of mine. Also it sems you can read my mind, I had “most people” written in the draft and then changed it to “many” in the final post after thorough reconsideration. Said that I guess we can agree on the fact that there were actually people in the SEO industry who weren’t happy with the change.
Also I don’t think you need to explain your transition again. I understand and respect your decision, in fact I also am convinced that the voting up to frontpage model does not work by itself. It can work with a strong social networking and stream component though. So while it’s important to notice what went wrong there still is hope for a niche social news site about search marketing.
As the Sphinn vs forums and SERPd point: Back in the days everybody was using forums but in recent years every forum is more and more like an island to me, especially those using a paywall. It may be that I’m more community focused than others due my geographical location being on the outskirts of the international SEO industry though.
As the reviewing the new Sphinn, I’m not sure enough has changed to review it beyond “now you can’t vote anymore”. Convince me. I haven’t been on Sphinn much after the change so I don’t really see other significant changes or improvements yet.
Tad Chef: I did not try to manipulate it, if this is what you mean. ;) Neither have I suggested that if you send it on twitter you manipulate the visits. Using Social Media is perfectly fine if you ask me. I refer to artificially increasing page views, or forcing pageviews but various methods (that obviously I am not going to explain here).
Thank you for the in depth review. It’s exciting to see that someone notices the little things such as our custom URL shortner :).
@Danny I guess we haven’t hit the main stream yet as SERPd has consistently maintained about a 6% or lower spam ratio on submissions we have received. I’m sure this will increase as things progress, and we are ready to deal with it if and when it becomes a problem. I personally submit your sites content to ours on a regular basis as I recognize you still have quality content worth sharing!
@Tad We are always looking for ways to improve the site for the benefit of the community. You have been voicing your ideas about the “stream” and improving the follower/following activity/feed features since day one and I want you know that I hear you. There are only two of us that actually created SERPd, we are not a big company and so as a result we have limited resources. We have to be careful about where we decide to allocate our resources, especially since this project is not an income producing one (and doesn’t appear to become one in the foreseable future).
That being said this is on the top of my list of things to develop, because frankly I think you are hitting the nail on the head with how to stay relevant to our community.
We have relied on the help of our volunteer staff to help spread the word about SERPd as well as to help brainstorm new features. We have recognized that even some of our staff are not immune to abusive behavior and as issues arise Gerald and myself are addressing them IMMEDIATELY.
The best thing anyone can do if they have an idea or a complaint is to email info@serpd.com. I promise you that we are looking very hard at any and all feedback the community is providing.
We have received several great suggestions from users that we have implemented on the site and I look forward to hearing more so that we can make the site what the community wants, not what someone else thinks they want!
It’s active users like yourself that are going to have the loudest voice in shaping the future of the community.
Regarding your critique about not being inclusive enough, I would point out that we have added categories such as blogging, WordPress, design, and copywriting to try to expand the scope of the site beyond just SEO. I will make sure we work harder to communicate to the community that we are looking to cater to anyone involved in making a living online, and not just the hardcore SEO professionals.
Keep up the great work and thanks again for bringing the site into full focus for your readers!
@Vasilis,
I really don’t see what the point would be of manipulating the page views on the submissions page, but I’m sure it could be done by someone that has too much time on their hands.
@onreact/TAD,
Thanks for writing this detailed review on SERPd. We appreciate your support and feedback! :-)