Whether you are still posting on steemit or have moved to hive steemit still has a very valuable and distinct advantage over nearly all the the sites on the web. That advantage is Page Rank and it is super valuable.
When I started posting on steemit almost 3 years ago it was because of Page Rank and had nothing to do with crypto. Yes, I mined my first bitcoin in 2013 but when I came upon steemit it was not for some silly steem token.
It was for SEO value. Search Engine Optimization was very important 3 years ago and it is still very important. Steemit.com has a page rank of 8. That is massive. Sites like Google and Facebook have 10's but that is very rare.
So why should you care? Well lets say you have a website online somewhere. Maybe even another blog or an ecommerce site or any site that you would like traffic to. One of the best ways to get traffic is for your site is to rank high in the google search results. That means organic traffic, not paid adverstising. If your site ranks in google, especially on the page 1 of google, traffic will roll in.
One of the key factors in getting those rankings is getting a backlink from another website. A backlink is like a letter of recommendation from one site to the site that they are pointing to through the link they are suggesting. The better the site, the better the link.
You see, when you type a search in the google search box, google treats you as a customer. You are a customer seeking information and google wants to give you the most relevant and authoritative information they can find. One element of that is a link back from an authoritative website. Well they don't get much better than a PR 8 site like steemit.
That is why I joined steemit and it helped the sites of my web clients rank highly in google and ahead of their competition. This web authority is something Hive doesn't have and will take a few years to achieve it if they can match the posting volume and traffic of steemit.
So lets say that I have a business I am trying to promote online. Would it be better to post about it on steemit or hive. Hands down steemit is the winner. That is not saying that steemit is better than hive , it is saying that it is different and for a marketer or business owner you cannnot ignore steemit.
Having said that the highest value link available from the steemit domain is called a "do follow" link. That means that google passes all the value of the steemit domain will pass to the site it is recommending. There is also a tag called a "no follow" link. That link acknowledges that google sees that steemit.com is recommending that there is valuable information on the other website but the "link juice" remains on steemit.
Both link tags have value but the "do follow" which passes the steemit link value to the other site is the holy grail of SEO. Two years ago there was a post that showed when a post reached a value of $20 or more, the tag in the code switched from a "no follow" tag to a "do follow" tag. That again is really important a reason in itself to post on steem.
I'd like to know if that $20 level is still in place or if it can be changed. This is a really important.
Let say if, (that means I really do lol) had a business that sold and rented out portable ice skating rinks and wanted to get an advantage over all of my competitors. I would want to write about it on steemit.com , put a link to my domain in the text and hope it got over $20 in earning or whatever threshold kicked in the "do follow" tag.
I know this sounds complicated to many but it isn't. It isn't even something steemians really need to understand. All it means is that steemit.com has some insane value regarding digital and content marketing and should not be ignored.
I'm very happy to discuss this with anyone interested in learning about the value and use case of this with regard to steemit.com . This has nothing to do with Hive and the value of posting there as well