This Friday, after three years, SEO community site ThreadWatch is closing down. ThreadWatch’s owner and operator, Aaron Wall (of SEOBook) made the announcement, saying that the site just wasn’t working out for a variety of reasons, including a lack of respect and credibility, an increase in Digg-spam and other shady practices by members, and the decreasing need of the site due to better coverage by mainstream media, big blogs, and other community sites.
I’m sad to see ThreadWatch go. As long as I’ve been blogging, it’s been there, and while it was never a place I hung out, it was always worth checking out, usually with some good commentary you didn’t get anywhere else, and more edgy and adult than other sites dared be.
As you can see in the Alexa graph, after Aaron took over ThreadWatch in late 2005, traffic seemed to have increased, but this year has been a particularly bad one for the site. I wonder if that had a lot to do with Aaron’s decision, and if he’d be interested in sharing some site stats now that it’s over.
Hopefully, there’s some exit strategy for ThreadWatch. Certainly, a website with a lot of backlinks and community is worth something, even if just sold off to someone who wants to use it as a link farm. I’d love to see a new owner keep the site as a community, but give it the support to help it grow again. As one farewell comment said:
Another site that dared to be unique gets unplugged.
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