Tag Archives: content

Gil talks content, community and traffic at #SMX East.

Gil Reich, VP of Product Management at Answers.com (and blogger wizard behind Managing Greatness), presented today at SMX East in New York City. His presentation covered the kinds of content that get more traffic, where your traffic is coming from, your site’s community and more.

Check it out for yourself – Gil posted a detailed outline of  his talk in his blog post, Search Traffic and Community-Generated Content.

Find out more about the SMX East panel he was on below:

SEO and User-Generated Content – Monday, October 4, 10:45-12:00
The “voice of the customer” can be a dual-edged sword. Positive reviews and comments can help reinforce reputation or even persuade others to buy. Negative feedback can be the kiss of death if it gets out of hand. But ultimately, applying good SEO to user generated content extends the reach of your site and gives you more potential touchpoints with searchers, particularly if you mine your UGC for keyword research. Come see how several sites are turning the (free) content created by their customers into search engine gold.

Gil addresses the SMX audience again on Wednesday, so if you’re in for the conference, make sure to catch his second panel:

Show Me The Links – Wednesday, October 6, 10:30-11:45
Yes, yes. Do a top 10 list. Got it. Attract links with rewards. Heard that. What else you got when it comes to link building? In this session, link builders share real life stories of how they obtained hard-to-get links. Is it the relationships, stupid? Focusing on what matters? Tips and strategies, for the pros.

Want to catch up with Gil between now and Wednesday? Find him on Twitter: @GilR or leave a comment on Managing Greatness.

Diets, literature and counties: New reference content on Answers.com.

We’re pleased and proud to announce three new collections of information that are now live on Answers.com, each of which can feed a particular type of craving.

  1. Encyclopedia of Diets. Learn the pros and cons of the Chocolate Diet, the Kidney Diet and the Warrior Diet.
  2. Literature and Its Times. From Hamlet through The Little Prince to Angels in America, here are literary classics discussed and analyzed in context.
  3. United States Counties. For lovers of stats, here’s where you can find out the population of Queens County, New York; the average income in Alfalfa County, Oklahoma; and where Coffee County, Alabama got its name.

We aim to answer. Happy reading!

Getting political (Q&A) on Answers.com.

Answers.com went live this week with two new collections of ReferenceAnswers Q&A – U.S. Politics and the Supreme Court. They answer questions like:

Both sets of Q&A go back to the nation’s founding and continue up to nowadays. They manage to present topics that are quite complex in a very straightforward manner.

In addition, our site now displays the entire contents of Beacham’s Guide to the Endangered Species of North America – 1,200 species of animals and plants facing the threat of extinction. Take a look at the Mariana fruit bat, the black lace cactus, and the quino checkerspot butterfly.

We aim to answer. Happy reading.

Night of the Radishes?! Now you know.

Last week, while I was in New York attending BookExpo America on behalf of the Answers.com Content Team, our content integrators published a slew of new content on our site. I should go away more often.

Festivals and Special Events: every celebration, commemoration, feast day or fast day that’s important to any culture around the world – be the event holy or profane, solemn or kooky – all the relevant info is in here. Learn about the Dog Days, the Night of the Radishes, the National Manly Man Festival and Spam Cook-off, or the Tanabata (Star Festival).

In a related development, we also went live with a collection of “When is?” questions. For every one of the special days and events in the group mentioned above, we have an entry that asks and answers the question, “When is ?” E.g., When is Purim, When is Kentucky Derby?

Need a new set of wheels? Avail yourself of the professional expertise in our new Car Reviews and see what car writers have to say about the 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche, the 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid, and my own next car (heh heh), the 2010 Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Are you wondering: Is anyone keeping track of the asteroids and comets that come close to the Earth? Need to know what was the deepest oil well ever drilled? Curious about how dolphins are similar to humans, or what the newest Hawaiian island is? You can find the answers to these and hundreds of others questions in Geology Q&A and Oceans Q&A. Don’t forget to watch out for the black smokers.

We aim to answer. Happy reading.

Up at bat: Baseball Stats.

To lots of us, springtime means baseball.

So Answers.com is pleased to announce its new collection of Baseball Stats – a fun, somewhat idiosyncratic analysis of the top players of all time in each position. The author, an amateur but incredibly devoted baseball statistician, developed a whole new way of rating players. And he’s not afraid of telling you who should be in the Hall of Fame and who shouldn’t – even if the player already is.

See if you agree with him on Jim Rice, Gil Hodges, and The Top 100.

We aim to answer. Happy reading.

Answers.com talks content at OMMA.

Answers.com is proud to participate at MediaPost’s OMMA event today in New York City. Bruce Smith, Chief Strategic Officer, will be sitting on a panel about content at 4:30pm. If you are there, feel free to leave your thoughts on the panel in the comments below.

Here is some more information about the session:

Grilling the Content Farmers: When Data Drives Publishing

A new breed of publishing emerged this past year that reverses the polarity of traditional behavioral targeting. Instead of using content to identify user interests and target ads, they use search and other online behaviors to direct which content to create and push in real time into the information economy. Traditional publishers recoil at the prospect of automated editorial decisions, but do these brash new players have something to teach old media? Advertisers wonder what value to place on these audiences and their declared interests. We bring together new and old publishers and their ad clients to explore the implications of a demand-side content economy.

Moderator: Terence Kawaja, Managing Director, GCA Savvian Advisors

Panelists:
Saul Hansell, Programming Director, seed.com, AOL Inc.
Patrick Keane, CEO, Associated Content, Inc.
Steven Kydd, EVP of Content, DemandMedia
Bruce Smith, Chief Strategic Officer, Answers.com
Josh Stinchcomb, Publisher, Conde Nast Digital

Combating plagiarism with helpful checkers.

Recognizing itself as a site that relies on user-generated content, WikiAnswers has created and enforces a detailed Plagiarism Policy. It doesn’t happen every day, but when members do come across copied information in answers, it helps to know that there are ways for handling it:

  • Removing the copied material is a must.
  • Adding the web page with the helpful material as a Related Link is a great way to guide readers towards it without copying it directly.
  • Summarizing the content in your own words in the answer and citing/linking the resource is also acceptable and encouraged.
  • Of course, informing the user who copied the content into the answer is crucial so they don’t make the same mistake again. Most users are just trying to help out, and sometimes lose track. Use the message boards for this.

Earlier this week, I came across this blog post in Search Engine Journal which rates online plagiarism checkers.

They’re rating five checkers based on data source, registration required, reliability and usability. Seems like Copyscape came out the winner.

So if you come across an answer on WikiAnswers that seems to be from another site, plug it in to the checker and hope for the best.