10e20 Blog

Yesterday Netscape made the official announcement that their social news site (currently at Netscape.com) would be moving to the new domain Propeller.com. This came on the heels of months of speculation and another update last week that they would be moving their ‘Digg clone’ off of the main page and moving back to the portal style site.

So what does this mean for you? To begin with, I think the traffic numbers will decrease (at least in the short-term) as some users make the switch and many move on to other places. Over the past few months we have seen an average of about 2,500 visitors for a typical Netscape front page. But the quality of what is on there right now (this is currently on the homepage with over 100 votes) is really effecting the level of traffic that is visiting. On top of that, there simply aren’t many links built from Netscape stories. I’ve discussed this with a bunch of colleagues and that sounds pretty right on for them as well. Hopefully, they will be able to move this completely out of Netscape and Digg’s shadow and build up a powerful, well trafficked site. I really hope this happens because just like you need alternatives to Google, you need alternatives to Digg.

But what’s the biggest loss in moving to Propeller.com? Moving from a PR9 site with over 20,000,000 links to a PR0 (not even) site with 10 links. Heck, Netscape didn’t even give it a real link in their blog post (they simply wrote http://www.propeller.com/). Why is this significant? Netscape was great for getting sites indexed quicker and for links from a trusted site. For example, take a look at a story that is currently on the homepage and the links that Yahoo is already showing for it:

On top of that you could use Netscape to indirectly rank for terms with new sites (the Netscape page ranks and someone clicks through to your site). For example something that got a lot of attention last year: DIY laser hair removal - a Netscape page ranks #5 in Google:

Netscape won’t be able to pass any of their link juice (or their nicely aged authority status) over the new site because they will actually be redirecting Netscape.com to aol.netscape.com. But then again Netscape’s Digg clone was started by a guy who hates SEO to begin with and maybe this is a good thing for them – the community doesn’t seem to mind too much based on initial reactions at the site. But as Danny Sullivan points out at least they could put up a landing page of some sort….

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Posted by Chris Winfield at 11:25 am
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