Many of you should remember (hopefully, with some fondness) Search News Central, which Dave Harry brought to us for several years ““ its last issue was in August of 2013. Some two dozen authors, the majority of them prominent SEOs and digital marketers, contributed their knowledge, interpretations, advice and rants, sparking some lively conversations.
For the next couple of years after SNC went dormant, Dave and I had several conversations, discussing what, if anything, to do about the site. His greatest concern was that whoever took over should preserve its original intent, keeping it a place to learn, teach and share. He wavered between handing it off to someone else and keeping it, and about a year ago, I finally convinced him to sell it to me, based upon my pledge to respect what he’d built.
The immediate problem, for me, at least, was that the site was built on Joomla ““ a platform I’ve developed a strong dislike for over the years. I also wasn’t sure exactly how to work SNC into my already full workload. So I dragged my feet for a long while, until I eventually decided it was time to pull the trigger. I hired a specialist to perform the Joomla-to-WordPress migration (Dave’s wife, Tanya”¦ she rocks, if you ever need a dev!) and moved everything to my own host.
To make things more interesting, while it was being ignored, hackers had kicked in the door and planted enough injections to make SNC a top competitor for various performance-enhancing pharma products. Tanya cleaned out the injections and migrated the site. Then I took over to deal with over 500 not found errors, a steaming pile of more than 1200 invalid spammy URLs and a manual action. Now I’m streamlining it and playing around with design ““ gotta make it load fast and be easy on the eyes, right? Soon, I’ll be reaching out to a bunch of you to invite you to join our herd.
It’s time to bring SNC back to life!
For now, you may stumble across some minor issues”¦ some of the images that used to be present are no longer available, for example (because the author hotlinked to them on their own site, and they no longer have them available). There are probably a lot of minor things like that to find and fix, so bear with us, please. If you spot something, feel free to call it out in the comments on that page and we’ll add it to our to-do list.
And if you’re interested in becoming a regular writer for SNC ““ whether it be a monthly thing, weekly or just now & then ““ drop us a line and we can chat. If you were already writing for us, that door remains open”¦ we’d love to have you continue.
