Photo taken by Elemenoh, Flickr Creative Commons

When I got back from working and traveling in the UK, I settled down in Montreal and bought my first pieces of furniture at IKEA. Among those was a loft/mezzanine bed, which I thought would be a clever purchase to gain some real estate space in my tiny room. That was 7 years ago. Turns out I hate sleeping up there, so for the past few years I’ve been sleeping on the floor, underneath the metallic platform while the bed itself has become an expensive dry rack.

Last weekend I decided it was enough and unmounted the bed to get rid of it. I’ve been a fan of Craigslist for a while now. I check the Real Estate and Missed Connections almost daily, and other sections sporadically. Even thought its style is raw and primitive, it remains easy to navigate and very efficient at communicating information. I put up an ad to get rid of the bed in the Free Stuff section and less than an hour later someone was at my door to pick up the beast!

Craigslist, with its millions of monthly visitors, is a huge success. It has remained ad and banner free, runs with less than 30 employees, and thanks to its flagging system run by the community, is mostly spam free.

Can the Power of Craigslist Be Harvested for SEO Purposes?

I have researched the question and found this article which details the matter fairly well. Basically there’s 4 things that you need to know:

1. A well written post with at least 100 words has a great code to text ratio.
2. You can add your own H1 tag in the post. The post title is set has an H2 tag.
3. Craigslist adds a “rel=nofollow” to any links added in the post. Still, it makes for juicy links since the ad will be seen by many people and will probably rank high in search engines.
4. It is very likely that your ad will get flagged down (probably by competitors) – Avoid spammy-looking post in favor of organic ones.

I have tested Craigslist’s capabilities for a project I’m working on. Point 4 proves to be a big issue. The first ad I put up got flagged down 30 minutes after being visible to the community. The next day, I tried putting up another ad, which stayed up less than 20 minutes on the site. In both cases, I made sure the ad was as “innocent” looking as possible. Even though they were taken down rather soon, the ads got us a total of 77 hits in less than 45 minutes (in the Toronto area), which is pretty good. Imagine what it would be like if it had been up for a few hours in multiple cities.

Is the World Going Local?

It’s been about 50 years since the expression “Global Village” has first been coined by McLuhan. I now wonder if things are headed in the opposite direction. Of course globalization won’t disappear, but local life will increasingly gain importance in our lives. In a way, Craigslist’s success is due to the sense of community it helps hosting in local areas. A survey of the “Rants and Raves” section of different cities is a great way to experience various cultural specificities.

Geosocialisation applications such as Brightkite are also on the rise. I think once Twitter will go local we might experience a big shift towards geo-specific communities, from communicating with surrounding friends (and follow their whereabouts) to shopping, from walking the dog to exercising. In a way, I believe the future of Social Media might be headed in that direction.

Care to comment? Please do!