Social Bookmarking Profile: Newsvine

For the intellectuals of the world, Newsvine is your Digg.

What is it?

Newsvine is a community of "Citizen Journalists" whose work rivals the mainstream news media sites. This group is not exclusive, but to have a successful "Vine" of stories and seeds, it is necessary to have an eye for news, a willingness to speak out, and a strong grasp of the English language.

Low quality work will never rise up the Vine.

Strengths

For high quality work, the rewards can be many. Because everyone gets their own sub-domain to post their work, it is possible to create a very strong stand-alone website with posts and seeds to others' work.

While it is strong at building high quality backlinks, the real benefit is the earnest traffic that can come from it. Though it won't shut down your servers, if you post something that is high-quality and thought-provoking, you can drive many people who can recognize greatness and may bookmark your site for future visits.

Unlike Digg, it is possible for a great story to work its way up the vine without having to build up a stock of friends to help it build momentum. Great stories rise of their own merits, regardless of the person who seeded or wrote the story.

With that said, longevity and having that stock of friends built up still helps.

The spam filters (i.e. self-policing Viners) are very sharp. This is great for someone who really wants to write and disastrous for spammers. A spammer can spend a lot of time and effort working their way up the vine, only to find that they were caught, deleted, and banned from the Vine forever.

Weaknesses

The competition is tight. Because so many of those who post articles are journalists with professional credentials and strength in their eloquence, it isn't easy to present the type of work that moves up quickly.

For those who are just looking for backlinks, this is not the place to go. It takes much more effort to get a story indexed and get a backlink than Digg, Furl, or some of the other "spammer friendly" websites.

Nofollow

Newsvine has no need for nofollow. Its very nature and the nature of its community does more to fight spam than a nofollow attribute could ever hope to achieve.

Conclusions

As a social bookmarking tool for SEO, Newsvine is not worth the expenditure of time and effort. For someone looking for good, quality stories and a community that rewards good, quality contributors, Newsvine is perfect.




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