User-Generated Content and the Power of Blogs
Posted: April 11th, 2008
User-Generated Content
Whether it be the decreasing cost of the Internet, its ease of use, an affinity for expression, sheer vanity, or a combination of them all, the amount of user-generated content (UGC) is rising exponentially. Everyone from your best friend’s mother to your neighbour’s kitten has a MySpace/Facebook/Orkut/Bebo account or user profile somewhere with very vital information like their favourite music and colour.
But beyond the social networking profiles exists one particular flavour of user generated content - blogs. This special category of user generated content has been gaining a lot of momentum and popularity over the web, and search marketers need to pay close attention to its impact over search engines.
The Power of Blogs
Blogs inherently derive an appreciable amount of power. They are generally comprised of unique content in the form of crawlable text, aside from photo-blogs and video-blogs. With the help of blogging CMS platforms such as WordPress and MovableType, blogs are more likely to be well organized through categories, which makes them easier to be understood and crawled by spiders.
The social aspect of blogs and their frequency in updates (usually at least once per week) make them particularly easy to promote through social media, such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Propeller.
You might have noticed that some user generated content dominate some SERPs already, in the form of blogs, Squidoo lenses, and Wikipedia pages. People have found it easier to link to UGC because of a belief in the impartiality from the average person, and the link building is susceptible to grow virally.
I have been wondering the impact of UGC on search engines, particularly since thousands of new blogs are created each day & the many different social networks to promote them through. Thanks for the article.
You’re welcome. There’s definitely a plethora of blogs hitting the net everyday, and it will be interesting to see how the major search engines cope with splogs (spam blogs).
Great article. Blogs and the social networking method for promoting them will definitely impact the way people get information. I already find that I look at the hot lists on sites like Digg and Reddit. This is the news people are interested in, not the news that media editors have served us.