We really appreciate your thoughtful, constructive criticism. We are hoping to encourage this kind of dialogue between businesses and their communities, all over the web. That’s part of our larger purpose in building a valuable guide to the web.

It has been our experience that no one likes to edit a blank page. So to get folks started, we pre-populate pages with the basic contact information, a thumbnail image, a few sentence description, and maybe categories. Our intention is that this serves as an invitation to get involved and help build this guide to the web. This initial information is also useful in it’s own right for many people, because it presents information in a standard and summarized way which saves readers time. As pages are improved by folks in our community the value increases much further.

As mentioned above (see the link for featured sites), AboutUs has quite a lot of good content created by the community (including staff). We are also a place entire industries can organize themselves: LASIK, PortlandTech, Portland Beer Wiki

With regard to the rel=NoFollow tag, as you are probably aware this tag was created to stop spammers from going to blogs and taking advantage of them by posting link upon link to their own sites and thus driving unwarranted PageRank to said sites. As a wiki, we have this same problem. More importantly for us, because we have pages about all domains, linking to sites in “bad neighborhoods” is also a serious problem. We are working on a way to turn off NoFollow for pages that are part of the valuable guide to the internet.

As for AdSense, we are like many other sites who need to pay the bills. We do plan to offer options for folks who either don’t want to see ads or don’t want it to show up on certain pages.

We are having this public conversation here: http://aboutus.org/FollowNoFollowDiscussion – join if you’d like.

Best, Mark

Also they do not (now) offer any page rank benefit for your site because they have chosen to add the REL=NOFOLLOW tag to prevent search engine spiders following the link to your site. Call me cynical but it feels like this was probably planned all along, ie. don’t use NOFOLLOW when AboutUs was first built, then add it later to coerce people who understand a bit about NOFOLLOW, and discover their domain on the site, (e.g. by means of GoogleAlerts text filters) to request an Article and/or the NOFOLLOW to be removed. They give their own reasons for using the Nofollow tag, but it sounds fishy to me. Using NOFOLLOW prevents AboutUs pages bleeding page rank from their site to your sites. Thats why 3 way links are usually preferred instead of reciprocal linking (2-way). Getting a bit SEO deep here.

I think AboutUs is just a clever way of making money via advertising on their site, or them writing an article on your behalf (paid?). To all intents and purposes its just like another of the thousands of MadeForAdsense web sites which clog up the internet without providing anything really of benefit. Its just duplicating content that your site already provides. It only offers anything of value if the domain owner (you) come and edit your AboutUs wiki page, which is again not AboutUs actually doing anything. Well thats how it seems to me!

As a webmaster I am approached every day by sites wanting to arrange reciprocal links, and its surprising how often they have set up a link to our site already (eagerly appearing to please) but sneakily used Nofollow in the link so their site does not “bleed” page rank. That, in my book, is cheating, and why I feel strongly about why AboutUs should not make money from other peoples efforts.

Plus the fact to my mind its not them providing anything of value. Its just a glorified MadeForAdsense site, e.g. a site created rapidly using duplicated information/articles readily available from (and already provided by) other sources purely with the intention of making money. No creativity or thought has been put into making unique good quality information about a product, service or interesting topic.

I suppose in a way its like a search engine, and the same as Google monetizing their site with adverts, but its just a COPYCAT that spews out duplicate content with minimal effort. Who is doing the work? AboutUs or you? Wouldn’t you be better spending your time on a link building or Article writing campaign with sites who are actually related to your business, and will give you Followable (spiderable) links.

Clever idea nonetheless!
Jim

See my review of AboutUs here: http://nathanr.ca/opinion/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-aboutus/

I joined AboutUs.org a while back and must have gotten sidetracked because that’s as far as I got. I will spend some time to day filling in the details.

I am trying ours.

I am tryng ours.

Looked at from one perspective, I’m simply linking to be part of this “rising tide lifts all boats” kind of cross-linking strategy. On the other hand, it’s about giving readers of the site relevant information. While http://AboutUs.org certainly works for the former, it’s much, much more interesting to use it for the latter. See http://www.aboutus.org/Portal:AboutUsFeatureMe for a list of the pages AboutUs has featured. These really great pages end up on the front page of AboutUs and they definitely get a bump to both their traffic and their search results. Check it out and let me know if you need any help with AboutUs.org!

@ Joe – Thanks for the tip on Builtwith. An interesting way of extending my connections.