Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Sphinn opened it’s doors on July 12, 2007 to the general public. It is a social networking site geared towards the search engine and internet marketing crowd. Like Digg, Bumpzee, PlugIM you can vote on a story that you like. We can add it to the long list of social media sites that are already out there. Danny Sullivan is behind the creation of Sphinn so I expect this to take off like everything else. His company has simply created a new alternative for search engine marketers to come to besides some of the other powerhouse social sites. There have been a few debates over the site being good or bad, I can care less however since I wasn’t going to judge it until trying it out. Before making any judgments or stating opinions from what you have read, I urge you to take sphinn for a spin! Anyhow, I signed up for an account last week and have some mixed reviews.

Ciaran posted over at SEOmoz that Sphinn is nothing more then a popularity contest. I do agree with him on this one, there will be writers who will get sphunn just because of who they are. I bet there are people who do not even read the post and just sphinn it. People in the search industry like Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Venessa Fox will of course get more “sphinns” then anyone else, but to some extent I expect that. These people have there followers who will stick to them like glue no matter what they write about. Advice I have for everyone else is to just ignore it and write your own posts for the rest of the sphinn community to read. Downside the speed of the site, loading time seems slow for such a new site that doesn’t have as much traffic as it will in the coming months. I sure hope they fix the speed issue, loading is slower then most sites.

The good thing about Sphinn though is it is only for search and online marketing. This makes the website a great source for news from around the industry. You can see what is the “popular” topics of the day and week so you do not miss out on anything. Yes I am sure you can get the same news from a forum you read or other blogs like this one, but sphinn makes it just as easy. It is still in beta phase so bugs will get worked out. So far though the past week has been good and I expect to rub elbows with the rest of the search marketing world and introduce myself. This site just needs to get it’s feet wet with the rest of the industry. Anyhow I wish Danny and Sphinn the best of luck with this new project.

If you haven’t already noticed, I added the sphinn plugin to the blog to see how it goes. You can get the plugin from Michelle MacPhearson’s blog, and it is very easy to install.