I felt that it should be recognised exactly what a fantastic idea YOUmoz is, and how it should firmly cement SEOmoz as one of the premier SEO firms around today.  Now I don’t want to come across as a suck up, and in a Web 2.0 world of user-generated content, it’s not a unique idea, and while it will serve as a good forum for aspiring writers to present their ideas, this is not, in my opinion, the reason for its brilliance.  The reason is instead a selfish one, at least from an SEOmoz point of view.  It has long been held that two fundamental factors in search engine rankings are incoming links and unique content, and perhaps more recently, these two have been combined with the idea of linkbait.  The key idea being that unique, interesting content will garner links, and so have a positive effect on two fronts.

Now SEOmoz are masters of the linkbait format, but they have a problem.  Namely, they can only produce unique content as fast as their dozen or so staff bloggers can write it.  What if they could harness their entire community to produce unique content for them, and have them do it for free as well?  Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Well, yes it would, and it’s called YOUmoz.

Of course, not any site could implement such a feature so successfully; after all, why would I publish my content to another site? The answer is simple.  The vast readerbase that YOUmoz can give to a writer simply cannot be matched, in the majority of cases by their own sites.  In short, the work of the SEOmoz team in producing a great site with many readers, means they can “pay” YOUmoz writers, not with cash, but with a large potential reader base.  If these readers like what they read, they may well look at the writer’s profile, and then the writer’s site.  A lesser site than SEOmoz would not confer such benefits on writers, so the writer would well be advised to publish on their own site.

So, in conclusion, a massive congratulations to the brain behind YOUmoz, in part for the creation of a great resource of SEO articles, but mainly for recognising that the power of the SEOmoz site could be harnessed to create a stream of free, unique content.