The history of Community & SEO — Jim Christian // Blush Digital

Quotes

• “We have been busy working on our Napa Summit for the last five years and we recently just had to cancel because of the whole COVID-19 thing. In light of that, we already had aspirations to create a community for everyone and we decided to do that with digitalmarketers.org, with our little academe force.” -Jim

• “SEO has been around for a while and I guess one of the founding fathers is Danny from SearchEngineLand and also Rand Fishkin. These SEO forefathers are really trying to bridge everything together for us to come together in different events and throughout the years.” -Jim

• “Community for us means that we are trying to drag education further than what it has been in the past and trying to provide space for everyone to not only connect with each other but also educate themselves.” -Jim

• “I think throughout the years, Google and the other search engines have gotten stronger in the facet of SEO being more complex, so its driving people to gain more knowledge in order to play in the space.” -Jim

• “One of the things that I have observed with SEO community is that, because Google is inherently a black box, i.e. they are not describing what their algorithm is, theres always a lively debate around things like, what are the ranking factors. Theres always something to speculate and people are pointing towards different data points but they only have the data from their brand.” -Ben

• “Now that youre touching on it, today Google went on with their webmaster blog and released a new set of ranking factors that they plan on implementing in 2021. That has caused a number of articles to be fired up and its going around the community as we speak.” -Jim

• “You have older forums like Digital Point or BlackHat World that are still out there and still cooking but it seems that those have waned off and they have not been doing well in terms of high-quality content or feeding information to a more advanced crowd.” -Jim

• “I think the communities are equal and open to everyone. It just depends really on what you are looking for. Some people are looking for advanced information only and they only want to talk to enterprise SEOs and so they might go to Traffic ThinkTank for that and so they are going to be paying for it and its expensive and the question is how muchvalue are they getting out of it.” -Jim

• “What we are trying to do is to be open and equal to everyone, so we want the SEOs, we want the PPC people, CRO people so any people connected with digital marketing because there are facets that interconnect with each other.” -Jim

• “We have already set in some safety features for the DMO (Digital Media Optimization). We make sure that the content is not only correct but also conforms to our community guidelines.” -Jim

• “The world is moving digital and obviouslywe cant get together in person in large scale today and so online community makes a ton of sense.” -Ben