Are Pligg Sites Good for SEO?

The short answer is:  Not really.

The longer answer includes “sometimes.”  First, I’m going to go through the attributes of the Pligg sites that are good for SEO – so you know what to look for.  Then I’ll explain the common problems that make 90% of Pligg sites a waste of an SEO’s time.

Qualities of SEO-Friendly Pligg Sites

• All links are “dofollow”
• Story titles link directly to URLs, not to an intermediary discussion page
• Link hypertext doesn’t spell out the URL
• Some sort of Pagerank makes it past the homepage, on at least a few categories or something!

SEO Advantage of owning a Pligg Site:

• Perfect niche matching
• Control front page, choose high-exposure articles
• Add sidebar links on related categories to your SEO target pages

Overall, its pretty hard to find a Pligg site that fits all of these criteria.  Anyone can create a Pligg site in just a few minutes at Dreamhost or a lot of other shared website hosts, and the total cost is literally like five to ten bucks a month.  Its really not hard to give it an attempt, but its pretty hard to get right.

Common SEO Problems in Pligg:

• Pligg sites crash a lot if they aren’t kept up to date.  Since a lot of functional code is in the templates and there really is no “stable” release to date, it can be challenging for part-timers or amatuers to keep any customized visual themes “up to date” as far as the latest security codes.
• The newest default template puts “nofollow” on every link.  “Out of the box” installs and Pligg admins who “start over” with the theme to keep up with security can undo all of the link value of your backlinks.
• Unmoderated Pligg Sites contain a lot of links to “bad neighborhoods.”  (check out this webmaster tool for all your sites and the sites you’re trying to get backlinks from!)

Getting the Most SEO Benefit out of a “Good” Pligg Site

Participate!  Don’t just submit your own links and then disappear.  I know I’m guilty of this myself at a few places, but it really is in your best interest to get involved with these bookmarking communities that have relevant themes and niches.  Popular members can get high PR profiles, and people are more likely to check out your articles and links.  Of course, the key to any successful submission is that the content fits the need of the group.  It is a democracy after all, and any good SEO needs to keep that in mind when working with web 2.0.