How does this site work?

A quick 5 minute spill that should hopefully explain the core principles behind SEOPal.

The Goal

The goal of SEOPal is to organize all the SEO information that exists.

There are lots of forums and blogs that share great SEO related information (which is awesome), however, none of these have taken the step to organize everything into something that works kind of like a reference guide. Things get repeated, data gets skewed, myths begin and most of all - algorithms change.

The purpose of SEOPal is to allow the SEO community to manage a very in depth database of SEO knowledge that is hopefully accurate, scalable and above all useful.

UserRank

The idea behind UserRank is the same as that of PageRank by Google.

Why? Because it works well for allowing users to control what's important and what's not. By positing quality content users of this site will collect votes by other users that feel the information is of high, useful quality. Rather than taking all of these votes and just adding them up and picking the user with the most votes a new layer of accuracy has been added.

UserRank takes into account user's voting patterns and looks at the whole voting network to decide which users pass more UserRank to other users. A vote by a user with a UR7 will be much more authoritative than a vote from a user with a UR2. By creating users with high trust and authority content can be moderated with a much greater accuracy.

How do users accumulate user rank?

A user may choose to promote or demote any type of content on this site. Each piece of content is internally tied to the author of it. A piece of content on SEOPal is equivalent to a page on a website (content:user as page:website). Each piece of content that gets voted on essentially says the author of that content just got a link :). Users that create quality content and get votes by other trusted and authoritative members will move up the quickest and have more say on SEOPal.

That's a quick lowdown on everything. For more info please check the FAQ.