Because SEOs and SMMs are always looking for another way to get content out to people and build links, new networks are always a hot topic in SEO news. Zurker, while not new, is a social network that several SEOs and SMMs have spent time evaluating to see if there is enough potential in it to invest the time and effort to cultivate it for future returns. What is being found more often than not is that Zurker is not all it is cracked up to be.
To be fair, Zurker is in alpha so there are problems. However, the UI is consistently sited as unfriendly. The site is said to lag a bit too much and to be straight – no one is there. Zurker might have around 90,000 profiles, but many are inactive. Lot’s of people signed up, looked around and left. Zurker is offering nothing Facebook doesn’t offer aside from their mystical “vshares” that assign virtual ownership to members. Even that isn’t enough to keep most SEOs or SMMs we spoke to around beyond a test drive. Even backlinks dumped on Zurker are failing to produce value to this point with the aide of promotion.
Zurker does have it’s defenders, but few make arguments that hold merit. Being new doesn’t provide carte blanche to work poorly. The promise of virtual money from an owner that hasn’t delivered with this scheme dressed in different clothes in the past isn’t reassuring. Mostly it seems like a core group of users invested way too much time earning fantasy shares and shelling out real money fort hem as well, to admit that from an SMM and SEO standpoint, Zurker holds no real value. If you just hate Facebook, give it a shot, but don’t complain when you realize no one else is there.
