I used to be an active member on Digital Point (DP). To be honest I used to love DP since you could get help with pretty much everything there. No matter if I had a simple issue with my site code or some big topic I felt like discussing with likeminded. I would always get the answer on DP, both good and not so good ones.
However, those times are far gone now. Before I used to visit DP several times a day. No I hardly visit it once a week. What happened to DP?
First of all I think all the smart people on DP found somewhere else to play. Maybe blogs? Sphinn? Seomoz? I don’t know, but I sure do know they’re not on DP anymore.
I just had a visit though some of my favourite categories on DP which I used to visit regularly, the general marketing category. Here is some of the topics there at the moment:
- New Traffic Exchange - Promote Your Biz
- How much would 1040 email adresses sell for?
- How to get more people on my site?
- Marketing on Digg.com
Disappointing. Ok, let’s have a look at another category that used to be good, SEO:
- Have you contacted G for a drop in rankings?
- What is perma link?
- Is black hat seo illegal ?
- How will I know that this site is Dofollow?
All the topics are either dumb, covered a billion times before (try a freaking Google search) or their just plain useless. The only thing that’s left of DP is a huge archive of spam, questions repeated a billion times and Nazi moderators. What else could we expect?
Shawn, the owner and founder of DP left the site a long time ago. He still owns it, he just doesn’t care to participate on it or even take time to respond to queries about it. He’s left it to the moderators of DP which are clearly hated by pretty much everyone in there because of their strict and sometimes unfair rules.
There’s even rumours about Shawn being a scammer.
What could DP do to get themself up and going again?
First of all DP must get rid of Shawn. As long as he’s the owner nothing will happen, there will be no upgrades, no extra features and no nothing. He doesn’t bring any value to DP. Second DP needs a serious upgrade. Look at what Sitepoint did – they added lots of features. If DP want to keep up they need to respond. I don’t matter if you used to be the biggest and the best – if you stop evolving you will die a slow death.
I officially give up on DP now.
For those of you who are interested in the same stuff as me, business, online marketing and how to run successful websites, I do have some good sources for you for knowledge.
- Seomoz. I highly recommend their membership. Lots of great stuff on the inside and you get to ask questions to the Seomoz team every month – and trust me, they put time into giving a quality answer. Thumbs up for this service.
- Sphinn. There are a million blogs out there, but the gap between each good post is fairly big. No worries, you don’t have to read all that other crap. Use Sphinn and let the community vote on what’s worthy and not.
- Google Reader (Or any other RSS reader). Found a good blog? Add it. Make your own list of interesting blogs. That’s my main source of knowledge – my RSS list.
- Start testing and trying yourself. Learning by doing is the best way to achieve knowledge about something. If you wonder what works better than the other, try both.
- Share with other and other will share with you.
- Read magazines and books from Amazon. There are actually a lot of good information in a good book.
What’s your best sources of information?
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Well said. Digital Point is a waste of space and a host to spammers & fraudsters.
I got banned today for replying to an extremely rude moderator. I really think that DP sucks because of its moderators who run it like a hitler’s camp.
From the looks of many blog posts out there, it appears many make DP their choice of forums. BAD mistake. You all get what you deserve if you think for one second you are learning from that place. What a damn joke of a place.
To the owner of this blog; I just read a recent blog post by you about “getting backlinks”. That’s straight out of the digitalpoint playbook of clueless SEO’s. Boy; I sure hope you are done with that place and actually find somewhere that will help you learn.
Hi Doug! You obviously don’t know much about SEO if you consider getting backlinks a bad thing. “Boy”, I sure hope you grow up and become a “man”. Go read something.
Yes Kenneth; I know nothing. This coming from someone who claims becoming a SEO in 2007? Come on Kenneth. I never said backlinks didn’t mean anything. I meant that your blog post about backlinks has many tips in it that are very bad stuff. Sorry if I was not clear about that. I saw that no one in that thread called you out on it, so I think someone should. I also think many of your members in here come from DP and have learned from that place as well. Again, a bad thing. Our industry is hurt greatly from that place as people like you and others learn extremely bad things. I’m simply stating the facts.
So you figured since everyone else applauded me for my tips you just had to be the one saying their bad? And where does it say I started with SEO in 2007? It’s a bit more than 8 years since I had my first, paid internet job – which I would say is pretty good for being 22 years old. Anyways, enough about me. I would advise you to do something with your attitude. What do you get from writing this stuff? First off all, you’re the first to say those tricks are no good – who does that say something about? Everyone else or yourself?
Seriously, If you have nothing to contribute to the discussion I suggest you go somewhere else with your elite knowledge and let us “newbies” play alone – ok?
Yes Kenneth; just another blog who cannot take constructive criticism. Nice job bud. If all you wish are posts that praise you, then fine by me. I saw that not a single member of that spin site made a comment at all. What does that that tell you? Kids these days are extremely spoiled. I’m glad my 23 year old daughter is not however.
Good luck to you.