Say Goodbye to Netscape dot com and Your Free PR9 Back Links
Sep 24th, 2007 by msdanielle
If you missed out on the Netscape hype in the last few months, your opportunity for obtaining free PR9 back links from them is dead. Many bloggers gained significant free, high-powered back links as a result of landing on Netscape’s main page of user-generated content. It was as simple as submitting a well-composed link bait post pointing to your site, getting your friends and others to vote on it, and wait for the PR9 back links and traffic to roll in. Obviously, Netscape wasn’t dumb enough to let this go on forever.
If you were one of the many who were using Netscape to create stories that link back to your blog site, most likely you were pretty upset at their domain name change last week to Propeller dot com. “They’ve squandered their link power…to AOL!” Hahaha..!! Netscape dot com is now Netscape dot AOL dot com, delivering real news to readers…boooo. Users can post the same content in the same format at Propeller, but instead of having the power of Netscape’s PR9 and 129,000 back links, users gain a PR0 link with zero back link support. Yay.
Sorry kids, no more freebies from Netscape dot com. However, Propeller is still owned by AOL, and is linked to from the new Netscape (PR0) — but unfortunately, not from AOL’s main page (PR9). D’oh! It’s not necessarily a bad thing though, since lots of Netscape users will continue to use the site and generate traffic for you. But I know, it’s not as fun and exciting as getting a PR9 Netscape link, is it?!
What do you think about the domain change? Did this move throw a wrench into your link building agenda? Hmmm… Of course not, right? You’d never think of gaming Netscape like that!
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This is sad news. There’s been talk for a while that Netscape was shutting down its ‘digg-clone’ since it was plagued with spammers and low traffic. Now Propeller won’t have the spammers (but will still probably have low traffic).
yea i don’t understand why they moved a faulty system over to a no-credit domain. it’s totally backwards… maybe they’ll overhaul it…?
I think it was to do with the branding and user expectations of what netscape.com shoudl be.
Read about this a couple of weeks ago, they were saying that people expected a straight up news site, which is what it used to be apparantly.
I think its weird using a browsers homepage as a news site anyway, can you imagine the FF homepage turning into a mini digg spam fest
Dang! I must have missed the memo on the PR9 backlinks, guess I missed out on that, oh well.
I wonder how many of the users of the old system will switch over to the new system and then cause that to become PR9 like the old system was….maybe we should all try to get in on the ground level and get lots of articles there before it builds?
they’ve created an inherently faulty system (*cough*GOOGLE!) that’s easily spammed once users realize the potential of the links from a valuable site. even if propeller eventually builds up great back links and high pr value, it’ll get spammed. for sure. it’s destined for failure if they leave it in its current format. netscape should’ve just nofollowed their links…duh… it’ll be hard to find a similar system that hasn’t been gamed yet. which is part of the fun…
oh getting to your question…
you can test the site if you want but most likely there won’t be much value in the links
No Following the links would not have stopped the traffic grabbers. PR was only part of the reason people spammed it… click happy traffic was the other. Propeller will still get spammed, perhaps not as much.
Regards building the propeller site, Netscape is an old site with 129k links recorded in google, will take a long time for any new site to climb to that level. I reckon a lot of those links probably pre-date the social media thing they had going.
Netscape is a a real weird one….
Wow, I never knew Netscape give pr9 back links if one hits the main page. My articles are not good enough tho =(.
I don’t think there’s any reason to worry about that too much. There is no such thing as “not good enough”. I say this because as I meander around the blogosphere, I see sites with fairly poor writing that have much better stats than some sites with very good writing.
Maybe it’s just my opinion, but while content is important, I think the marketing and networking have just as much effect on your traffic and results.
Yeah I’m kind of coming to a similar conclusion, marketing makes a huge difference.
I think we could all provide examples of good sites that are overshadowed by poor ones… that said, I know some blogs who like it that way, one actually asks not to be linked to as he doesn’t want the digipoint tour-bus landing on his site…. depends why your blogging to a point.
the same thought came to my mind — there should be a reason why you’re blogging. marketing can expand the intent of your site to new readers, if thought out properly, but of course it shouldn’t overshadow your content…
Lame move…
It will be interesting to see how much the volume of posts drops off at Propeller compared to the old Netscape site. I’m sure there will still be a fair amount of volume there but I am not sold on trying to use the new site. There just seem to be better options available given that you don’t swing the PR9 link anymore.
looks like so far it’s not doing too poorly, but we will see soon how the trend goes
People should stop fussing over the Toolbar PR values. They don’t help with search engine optimization.
PR helps improve SEO though, say your site was “organically” a PR 4 and you bombed it to PR6 on Netscape. You could trade links with PR5 / 6 sites who wouldn’t give a PR 4 the time of day, thus improving your SEO. You could achieve in a few months what takes some sites a couple of years.
guess we won’t have a choice if/when google gives pagerank “values” the boot
Do you think they will?
A lot of people seem to believe that, but surely they would have announced it by now, and dumped the rank in the toolbar.
PR may be flawed, but surely an updated PR is better than an lingering old one?
Or do you think they are working on a replacecement? Or did they just forget to wind up their Miki Mouse alarm clock
screw PR . . . i hate PR . . . .
“PR helps improve SEO though,”
Nope. That’s just another SEO myth.
I had a very good idea ready to write about on how to earn extra good PR backlinks from Netscape… and the draft was ready but I delayed it and meanwhile netscape changed it to propeller.
Though we are losing good PR links, traffic still is lucrative enough to keep posting on propeller.