Social news sites come to prominence largely over the controversies associated with people gaming them, and without people gaming them few would ever garner a critical mass. Marketers spamming a social news site is part of the growth cycle.

• Andy Hagans highlighted 17 social sites that send traffic.

• Some authoritative sites like CSS Reboot and Recruiting.com are powered by Pligg.
• You can find thousands of Pligg sites here, and find a few that are relevant to your industry by adding your keywords to this string. For example, business.

If I can come up with an easy search string to detect that many Pligg sites you have to think that as people and spambots abuse them, the search engines will discount most of their votes, but short and long term there is still going to be value to many of them.

Why buy low quality PR2 and PR3 links from inactive parts of the web when you can get on topic ones for free? Of course most of these communities will have limited value and die (failing to build a critical mass), but if you are submitting useful content to the real ones that will also lead to indirect links and other signs of trust and quality.

Content networks with virtually no content cost, free software, and limited editorial control might call people who submit self promotional stuff spammers, but what are all these sites until they build a critical mass? Parasitic useless noise, a form of spam.

The difference between a spammer and a contributor is that a contributor will post at least a few entries that are not self promotional, and they will also create content worthy of exposure. Both of which help build the community.

If you feel bad about gaming markets just remember that every market and every value system is both self-promotional and gamed.

As a background, here are some background tips on formatting linkbait and free linkbait ideas.

Frank Schilling posts his thoughts on SEO while Brian Provost posts how to turn a .org into a .com:

My strategy for .com domain names has generally been to stash them away and forget they exist. I’ll take my SEO skillset and go develop the .org or .net cousins to build the exact same audience thanks to the overweighting of exact match in search engines, leaving the .com domains in the vault to appreciate.

If you are developing an online brand worthy of attention and can't afford the target .com you probably do not need it. Look how popular Del.icio.us got with their terrible domain name. Eventually they got the .com, but they made that investment after they proved their model worked.
Frank posted that he thought SEOs try to think of how they can game engines

Domainers think: "How can I exist without Google .. if Google blew away tomorrow, how could I guarantee traffic delivery?" .. SEO folks seem to think, "How can I get free visits from the top search engine and if that top search engine ever changes, how can I get free traffic from the next top search engine."

I don't think SEOs just look at Google for traffic. I think some of the best SEOs think of the web more in terms of the Cluetrain Manifesto, viewing the web as a series of markets and conversations, realizing that if they are frequently talked about then search rankings are a by-product of that.

If you are just getting into domains right now and want to develop sites that will get ranked you are far better off buying .org or .net domains, and saving the money the .com would have cost you to spend it on marketing and development of your .org or .net. If you are trying to predict new markets that you expect to become huge you may want to buy the .com. If you want to lock out competition buy all 3 extensions.

John Andrews recently wrote an article about how consumer ignorance and carnival barkers lead to a market that is a self fulfilling prophecy:

There is so much so-called SEO out there, mostly outdated, baseless, or downright wrong, that the accessible information is more wrong than right. A Google or Yahoo! search on SEO topics is ridiculous, for many reasons. Often accurate SEO information is considered trade secret by knowledge consultants, and thus is not very accessible. What appears in front of the inquisitive SEO consumer is mostly junk. This puts the prospective SEO client at a distinct disadvantage, and provides an opportunity for the contract-seeking "snake oil SEO salesman" to close a deal at a good profit, often without realistic accountability or other consumer safeguards in place. But, as the 2001 Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof showed in his famous paper "A Market for Lemons", asymmetrical information does much more than that. It actual can destroy the market for true, quality SEO.

Add to the above the following

• introduction to SEO via spam emails or cold calls from providers who know nothing about the concept of search
• spammy link exchange emails
• low quality sites ranking because they are old and links flowed easier in the past
• a rapidly changing marketplace
• hosts that scam their customers for an extra $30 a year selling fake submission services
• search engines that sell ads to the scam services and talk down the value of the high end services

Their is no reason to be surprised at how bad the service selling market is for many SEOs.

There are many other markets where the same type of market develops. In some cases it is even a sub-market of the whole that turns to trash. If your main keywords for your target market include discount / cheap / similar buzz words in your market then you might be selling to an audience that is not worth selling to, especially if your product is expensive or your service is time intensive.

Danny reported that Google is moving away from listing news articles in a OneBox, and instead places news results directly in the search results. In the past these pages would require building up significant trust criteria (linkage data, etc.) before being considered for a top organic ranking, but now their editorial inclusion in Google news is giving them a free pass to a top ranking for relevant search queries. This helps Google in 4 major ways

• Google is far from being the top news site, so this allows them to arbitrage the value of the news vertical using their core search results, while still keeping the search results relevant.

• This allows Google to put ads against their news products, which they have yet to attempt at News.Google.com.
• This allows Google to funnel more traffic to trusted content sources, and thus help subsidize the content creation costs, while making those sources more addicted to Google's traffic.
• Overrepresenting fresh trusted editorial content sources in the organic search results gives the organic search results an informational bias, allows Google to start working to depreciate their weighting on fresh blog stories, and lowers the value of small focused commercial sites (unless they are of a high enough quality to get press coverage).

Webmasters owning niche or seasonal sites that enjoyed temporal exposure will discover there are fewer traditional top 10 results that are open for the taking, because fresh news stories will fill in a few more slots.

In Addition, Google just announced web history, which allows you to search through documents you viewed in the past. Web history will help improve search personalization. If web history also directly becomes part of the organic search results then sites which can afford to spend a lot on advertising will also have another advantage over smaller sites.

Many people who took advantage of past inefficient markets are thinking that cheap, free, or social content is the next angle. But the idea is already saturated. Even Tim Armstrong, Google's VP of advertising, launched a thin content play. Andy Hagans has a great post about why the lure is much greater than the potenial rewards. There are new angles to the thin content that add context and value, but those are generally not something that can be leveraged across a portfolio of sites. eHow ranks so well because it was well researched around making money, and gained significant link authority back when it was easier to get links. Given the current market paranoia and the unnatural link patterns on the web it would be much harder to create an eHow today.

I think the best way to leverage content would probably be to buy out a unique source that is not monetized to its full potential, like a dying media company.