Back in 2010, David Harry (@theGypsy) launched SearchNewsCentral.com, an online publication intended to give existing and aspiring search professionals a place to teach, learn and share. He built a very respectable group of contributing authors over the next few years, each offering their own perspective on all things search.
In August of 2013, an article was published that would be SNC’s last for a long while, which prompted me to ask Dave what his plans were for the magazine. We spoke several times about it, and on one of those occasions, I told him that if he ever decided to sell it, I’d be interested. Eventually, after a few more discussions of my plans and his hopes for it and the logistics of a transfer of the reins, we came to an agreement. In May of 2015, we agreed upon a price and I became the proud owner of SearchNewsCentral.com.
About that same time, I got incredibly busy and SNC got pushed to the back burner for about a year and a half. I finally realized how long I had put it off and decided it was time to breathe some life back into it. It’s now been migrated to my own host, changed from Joomla to WordPress and I’ve cleaned up the numerous injection scripts, a manual action and a metric ton of spam URLs that had been created.
The .com site is intended to serve the U.S. and Canadian audience. But the UK and Australian markets are a little bit different and deserve their own respective versions, dedicated to address the issues that are peculiar to them. So I also started building out staging.searchnewscentral.com.au and searchnewscentral.co.uk ““ just “˜cause I figure if a person’s going to overdo things, there’s something to be said for going in whole hog.
I’ve reached out to the writers that were active on SNC in its heyday, and a several of them have enthusiastically pledged to continue contributing. A few, I haven’t heard back from yet, so I’ll be going into PestMode to get a yay or nay answer. Content is already rolling in and I managed to convince Danny Goodwin to join SNC at the editing helm, so I hope to be launching the .com version sometime in April.
As I promised Dave Harry, SNC will continue to be a place to teach, learn and share. So if you think you have something to offer in one of those areas and you’re interested in joining our ranks, reach out to me or Danny via our contact form. One of us will get back to you.
Searchnewscentral.com.au and searchnewscentral.co.uk are both up, although both are blocked and still very much works in progress. But if you’re from Oceania or the United Kingdom (or the Republic of Ireland”¦ you folks are equally welcome) and would be interested in writing for your version of SNC, don’t wait ““ reach out to us now via the contact form on the Australia site or the UK site ““ we’ll get back to you ASAP. We want to launch both these sites around the end of April, too.
Please let anyone you think is a good match know about this. We’re determined to make this a roaring success and the more contributors we have, the greater that success will be!
Hooray! I’m so excited!