They have no other choice. I'll hazard the guess that you know hella more about SEO than I do, so feel free to check my ass when I overstate: - Reddit was designed, from the very beginning, to be an outwardly-facing site. It's a link aggregator. Its whole raison d'être is to index, basically, for its community. - Reddit has no design features that allow it to parse "good content" from "bad content" the way, say, Google does. It's more of a "Yahoo-type" engine - Reddit's content is built by hand. Want good content, put it in. Want bad content, keep it out. Considering Alexis and Steve basically sockpuppeted their way to having a community, "gaming" Reddit is in its very DNA. - The implosion of slashdot and the implosion of Digg gave lots of people nowhere to go but Reddit. Meanwhile, the advent of F7U12 cartoons siphoned off a large percentage of angsty teens (and pre-teens) from /b/ to Reddit. Finally, the open graph of Facebook led to cross-pollination all across the Internet with Reddit as its initial vector. - Add in Obama's AMA. All of a sudden, PR firms are required to pay attention to Reddit. Where Reddit goes, so goes the Internet - and let's be honest, CNN has basically been mining Reddit for its human interest stories for about six years now. So whereas all those geeks used to share Reddit shit on their Facebook to be hip, now everybody grabs shit directly off of Reddit. ... and it's still, at its most basic level, an architecture of sockpuppetry. SEO and Reddit are like blood and vampires. I don't care how sparkly you are, I don't care how many rabbits you eat, I don't care how much you fight your nature - at a basic, carnal level, Reddit is a fucking spam magnet. Its early community existed despite this, not because of it, and the content it has now exists despite the attempts of the majority of its users, not because of it. Reddit really has become a madrassa for baby SEO jihadis. Each individual little 'tard on there is SEO-ing his way to karma. No wonder that anyone with a modicum of skill at it ends up dominating traffic. this comment sent this spatula to the top of Alexa's product search. Worldwide. For three days. By accident. You'd game the system too. * * * RE: Steve Martin - was it this link? 'cuz that's not me. otherwiseyep is a clever chap who is unsung entirely too much.Reddit is absolutely insane in the way they attempt to handle and mitigate spam. The evolution of reddit's position on blog spam and intolerance of anything original has gotten so blown out of proportion.
You're absolutely right and no, you didn't overstep your claims about SEO at all. I only know a bit because I've been doing the things the SEO company we hired tells me to. There is a lot of basic stuff like backlinks that reddit helps. In a nutshell if your site is linked from another reputable site (there are different levels of reputation) then Google sees you as being better and your listing goes up. So one backlink on a site like reddit will help your ranking on Google. That's why /r/all/new is so terribly filled with obvious spam links. This is a whole separate issue from the clickbaiting, adsense, pageviews thing that blogs also do (#1 offenders are HuffPo & BuzzFeed). This is another excellent point that I hadn't thought about. CNN has deteriorated as well. They have been pulling quotes and photos from twitter rather than getting reporters on scene for years now. In high school I remember CNN as being the reputable, objective spot. Of course reddit is going to be another great, minimal-effort source for fluffy content. I also remember the transition from posting the links to the stuff you found on reddit to facebook/twitter/blogs rather than linking to the reddit thread itself. That was a huge shift, occurring about the time of the digg exodus. When it went from being a secret cool kids club to a publicly cool club. I remember being guilty of posting content I found on reddit and having a couple friends who would post the same shit. We felt like we were part of some little inside club. We knew we were posting content that we found on reddit, but didn't call each other out on it. And holy shit I can't believe you found that link AND I was right about the Steve Martin thing. Bizarre. Thanks so much; that was bothering the shit out of me! Even 3 years ago some reddit users understood that fact and but were already fighting a losing battle. Blah. See how far reddit has shifted. Now the best way to accumulate posts is to repost shit that was posted a month, 2 months, a year ago. This. This. This. Blah.CNN has basically been mining Reddit for its human interest stories for about six years now.
It's okay to submit a link to a secondary source of commentary or analysis, provided that the secondary analysis is the substance of the submission. E.g., a detailed critique of a film review that raises interesting points about the reviewing process or biases of the reviewer is not blogspam.
The BEST internet is one where every single blog, website, forum, image gallery, e-commerce site, news aggregator, etc is trying to post dense, high-quality, original content. The WORST internet is one where every site is instead trying to hijack page views by re-posting content that is already available elsewhere. The PURPOSE of sites like reddit is to drill down to the interesting, original, dense content. The HOPE is that this kind of approach will spur more and better content creation and a less-cluttered internet.
Do you have the link for the history of chan boards? It was a reddit post from years ago, and it was a history of where all the smart kids would hang out on the internet. The japanese chan boards, then moot learning some japanese and wanting to host his own chan site, then some history of somethingawful and then eventually, with the air of an aged coal miner with granite eyes, he proclaims that the smart kids come to reddit now. Just cause we're doing it, here are two posts you made under my favorite bookmark folder, that would be in my primer for someone just starting to internet.