Using Qassia: An Intelligent Decision? - General Assessment
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I'm not really in a position to see if Qassia really does improve one's rank in the search engines. But I have to say that I'm impressed by the strict controls that Qassia has put into place. Not allowing for more than one account, ever, will help keep out spam if it works. Limiting who can screen what intel will help slow people down as far as slipping intel through the cracks that shouldn't be on the site. And making sure a relatively large number of people must screen intel before it is permitted or rejected (and letting them provide standardized feedback) improves the chances that what does get through will be of reasonable quality.
A poster going by the handle of Greekgeek reviewed Qassia on the SEO & Affiliate Marketing section of Squidoo not long after it went into closed beta. He noted that he "received low ratings for my short, informative but un-hip intel on obscure topics...that land many visitors on my Ancient Greece Odyssey travel blog." He did better when he started writing opinion pieces and humorously written "did you know" material, as well as detailed product and web site reviews.
Greekgeek concluded that, "In short, the Qassia dollars/ratings system is going to tilt intel towards breezy submissions that can be written and rated speedily." This can be thought of as either a bug or a feature, depending on your point of view. I think this issue may be inherent in the web itself, and the shorter attention span that most people bring to it.
Yes, there are places online where you can find deep, detailed information about particular topics, but so far those seem to be specialty sites that focus on that topic - for example, if you want medical information, you may go to WebMD to start with, and then look deeper. You probably wouldn't go to Qassia, even though they do have medical material on their site.
On the other hand, Qassia does seem to fill a need. It looks like it will be a fun site for browsers, and if you like going through random blogs, you'll probably enjoy it. If you're trying to get your site rated in the search engines, you might want to give it a try. I've seen mixed reviews on that, but when it works, it apparently works reasonably well. This is yet another case where only time will tell; it will be particularly interesting to see how well it scales once it's out of beta.
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