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While reading through my bloglines today, I found that some people who I respect don’t quite understand what Web 2.0 is all about.
While the term is overused, it seems (to me) important to understand the evolution of thought and business practice on the Internet. Tim O’Reilly does a nice job of covering the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0...
The core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:
Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
Trusting users as co-developers
Harnessing collective intelligence
Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
Software above the level of a single device
Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
Another blogger who continually turns out impressive work relating to Web 2.0 is Nivi. Recently his post on the Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes highlighted how “After 150 people, the value of your community doesn’t grow as fast as it used to. The value may, in fact, decrease as your community grows.”
While this only peripherally relates to black hat SEO, I believe that a careful combination of Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO techniques can help jumpstart peer production, communities and collective intelligence.
Does this change the world of SEO? Most SEO discussions are at the level of HTML code. Link building is considered a necessity but not so much liked as it is considered a very difficult and time consuming business. But at the same time, the influence of the WEB 2.0 is greatest in the area of link building.
The standard link building techniques (buying links, link exchanges and directory submissions) aren't that effective anymore. Pretty much its a big waste of time (except for submissions to some high quality directories). Links always were suppose to be a sign of popularity. Link popularity is suppose to be the result of having a popular website, not the result of placing links all over the place. Search engines are now getting so good at determining real (natural) link popularity that webmasters have to get back to basics.
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