Netscape's "Digg Clone" Returns to Editorial News

For some time now, Netscape has been acting as a social news portal. This allowed you and me to post articles, and get highly ranked, trusted pages linking back to our sites.

Unfortunately, like many web 2.0 sites, some black hats found out about the easy links, and they started abusing the service.

What used to work was a gentle article submission, once or twice per month. The links looked natural and organic. They added to your site's link popularity and PageRank.

But then, several people started spamming. Some clowns are posting article spam, in the internet marketing section, as often as every twenty minutes.

On top of that, Netscape made it easy, to create multiple memberships, and artificially inflate the number of votes, so your story would move up the charts. Some people even created software to automate the fake memberships, posting and voting for their own articles.

Even though Netscape did not name abuse as a specific reason, they have decided to become a traditional news source, with editorial content. Reactions to this change have been swift and mixed.

The public claim, they were just getting used to the social news and they were enjoying it. In addition, there are many mainstream news sources around, and Netscape just doesn't come to mind as being one of them.

So if they change from social news... who will use the site? Will it become a ghost town with virtual tumbleweeds blowing around.

Netscape claims that the social news is not going away. They just plan on moving it to another site.

Well, anyone who knows SEO will tell you, if you move a site and start with fresh pages, all the PageRank and Trust gets stripped away, and you have to start over.

So if you've been a contributor to Netscape and posting articles, expect to see a dip in your PageRank in coming months, as they move the service. If you have any thoughts or concerns on your Netscape contributions, you are encouraged to leave your comments on their blog, and participate in the ongoing discussion.