I'm not sure if prioritizing links over keywords is really going to help matters.
I know a lot of 'little guys' who know something about a topic and can write prolifically, but who suffer under the delusion that 'If I build it, they will come.' Success in SEO is largely possible because 95% of webmasters have no idea how to promote content.
I've also developed 'digital libraries' for major academic organizations and a common thread there is a complete lack of interest in indexability. There's a lot of fantastic content trapped in the ivory tower because nobody considered the 'unwritten standards' for how the web worked.
A big part of the problem is that it's very hard to get legitimate links these days. You used to be able to get into the Yahoo directory for free, but now you have to pay a $300 a year bribe. Before 2000, it was common for people to create large collections of links they liked. Today, major players like Engadget have a policy of not wasting their PageRank on other sites. Afraid of spam, many blogs and forums are on a hair trigger to stop people from dropping links in comments, relevant or not.
If legitimate links are harder to get, that 'lowers the bar' for spammers.
A real answer to spam would be to strengthen the signal so it can break through the noise. It might be helpful to be able to get more feedback from web users about the quality of pages, but this is tough. The horrible truth is that there are more pages on the web than there are viewers, so even if you could get feedback from 10% of viewers, many pages would be badly undersampled. Spammers would also target any feedback channels that exist, and with low response and sampling rates, it might be easier to overload the feedback chanel than it is to create link noise.
Another answer is to beat Demand Media at their own game, the same way that Stack Overflow has beaten the spam sites that dominated programming questions two years ago.
I know a lot of 'little guys' who know something about a topic and can write prolifically, but who suffer under the delusion that 'If I build it, they will come.' Success in SEO is largely possible because 95% of webmasters have no idea how to promote content.
I've also developed 'digital libraries' for major academic organizations and a common thread there is a complete lack of interest in indexability. There's a lot of fantastic content trapped in the ivory tower because nobody considered the 'unwritten standards' for how the web worked.
A big part of the problem is that it's very hard to get legitimate links these days. You used to be able to get into the Yahoo directory for free, but now you have to pay a $300 a year bribe. Before 2000, it was common for people to create large collections of links they liked. Today, major players like Engadget have a policy of not wasting their PageRank on other sites. Afraid of spam, many blogs and forums are on a hair trigger to stop people from dropping links in comments, relevant or not.
If legitimate links are harder to get, that 'lowers the bar' for spammers.
A real answer to spam would be to strengthen the signal so it can break through the noise. It might be helpful to be able to get more feedback from web users about the quality of pages, but this is tough. The horrible truth is that there are more pages on the web than there are viewers, so even if you could get feedback from 10% of viewers, many pages would be badly undersampled. Spammers would also target any feedback channels that exist, and with low response and sampling rates, it might be easier to overload the feedback chanel than it is to create link noise.
Another answer is to beat Demand Media at their own game, the same way that Stack Overflow has beaten the spam sites that dominated programming questions two years ago.