The SEO industry is buzzing on the recent news that Demand Media has filed an IPO. Demand Media owns and runs online properties such as eHow, Trails.com, LiveStrong.com, GolfLink, AnswerBag, Cracked and more. They are significant in that their whole content business is around ranking well in the search results, primarily Google and primarily organically.
Danny Sullivan has the best write up on what this all means. Here are his takeaways, but read the whole analysis for why:
- Google Funds Big Chunk Of Demand Media
- The Importance (And Risk) Of SEO
- Search Sends Nearly 40% Of Traffic; Google Alone, 26% Or More
- Traffic Is Vulnerable To Algorithm Changes
- Mining Search Data, they mine the data to produce content
- They do domaining
A WebmasterWorld thread is discussing the news. Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld, thinks these guys are genius SEOs:
What Rosenblatt and the crew have done is nothing short of genius in the SEO space. To qualify algorithmically and engineer daily content is freaking brilliant. To get it to rank and convert in the long tail is even bigger. No wonder everyone is so jealous of their success. They are the top SEO’s on the web. They are without a peer.
Another member asked, "I wonder if the recent google patent influenced the decision to IPO, or if they had already planned to?"
I doubt it.
In any event, this is one of those events that is somewhat historical for our industry.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
