Whilst i am still working on my ‘other’ blog post i thought i would just throw something out there, this post is supposed to be a little in jest so please don’t take it to seriously ok? Good!
I have had the fortune of having a couple of articles from this blog submitted, and then subsequently ‘go hot’ on Sphinn. The stories have usually been submitted on the same day that i released them to the blog but generally take 2 days until they go hot.
Once the story has gone hot then i tend to get a couple of hundred referrals from Sphinn which is nice targeted traffic, so what’s the problem?
Well the problem is that even though I published the story on my blog first, the Sphinn article has less text, and the Sphinn article is linking to me as the source, i often rank below the Sphinn page in the Google SERPS 
Lets look at exhibit A shall we?
As we can see from the image above, i wrote a post about the Pligg Auto Submitter which was actually published on the 29th July. However Google’s crawl date says 2nd of August, the same day as the Sphinn post. The titles are pretty much the same, and my URL is (arguably) better. Plus i have more content on my page.
Now if i could direct your attention to exhibit B
This one is even worse! I am 10th whilst the damn Sphinn post is 5th! Not only that, the sphinn post doesn’t even have a crawl date next to it. Oh Google you try my patience at times.
Now i am fully aware that the Sphinn domain has waaaaaay more authority than Chewie.co.uk, i am also aware that the Sphinn pages have more internal links pointing to them than my post. However in the world of relevant rankings, i do think that I should be ranking higher (who doesn’t :)) when Site B (Sphinn) is effectively republishing the work of Site A (Me) and also linking to the source… c’mon Google sort it out 
Don’t let this stop people submitting my stories to Sphinn though 
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About the Author:
Chewie is a guy who moved to London from the North of England to further his career in SEO. He has a background in design, coding, and marketing. He tries to keep this blog up to date as best he can, and talk about a ton of different things.
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October 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Well mate, I’d say the second example is due to the fact that you’re linking to the story on sphinn and it’s not linking back without a nofollow attribute (because it didn’t go hot).
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:48 pm
I have often pondered this topic..
from a users point of view, the likes of sphinn, digg, reddit etc..
are the places where they first discover the content,
users will often forward and link to the actual aggregate site rather than the content’s source page and this can also be true for where they leave their comments.
I’ve read many a linkbait where digg and sphinn has more comments than the actual source site, i suppose its the nature of the beast, while people can still continue to find interesting content on sphinn, then sphinn will continue to grow in popularity within the users mind. ultimately benefiting from the hard work of the original source..
Like Chew said, this is not a criticism of sphinn, more of an observation