by Danny Goodwin for Search Engine Land
LinkedIn is giving users more incentives to contribute to Collaborative Articles, promising greater visibility in search, feeds and notifications, the company announced today.
More visibility. LinkedIn plans to include more Collaborative Articles when people search for specific problems or topics. So if you’ve contributed to a Collaborative Article, this increases the odds your answer could be featured in LinkedIn’s search results.
Other ways LinkedIn is increasing visibility for Collaborative Article contributors:
- People outside your network may be exposed to your contribution, not just people you are already connected to.
- LinkedIn may also notify members “who would benefit” from your expertise.
Why we care. Contributing to Collaborative Articles provides a way to increase your visibility and your LinkedIn network and possibly even get leads. However, the format still is imperfect and needs more human editorial oversight.
Smart SEO play. LinkedIn Collaborative articles have been a smart and effective SEO play for LinkedIn so far. Just look at this growth (as shared on LinkedIn by Olga Andrienko, VP of brand marketing at Semrush):
But. It’s also resulting in a lot of SEO misinformation.
- “It’s churning out content about SEO talking about bounce rate, toxic links, and how you need to spend hours agnosing over meta descriptions. Just drowning in half-truths and misinformation. SEO is going to be particularly interesting in the next few years!” Mark Williams-Cook, Director at Candour, wrote on LinkedIn.
What else is changing. LinkedIn announced multiple additional updates to Collaborative Articles:
- Top Community Voice badges: Badges for a skill will appear next to your contributions to an article, no longer just on your profile.
- New layout: LinkedIn is putting a greater focus on member contributions instead of AI-generated text.
- All reactions available: Plus, you can see who has reacted to your contributions.
- Follow: People can now follow you directly from your contributions.
- Top Contributor section: Noteworthy contributors will be featured at the top of an article (most likely based on reactions).
- Cross-article linking: Internal links are being added to articles to make it easier to discover and read more articles.
- And more: LinkedIn is promising better quality and depth for articles; better algorithmic recommendations based on your posts/articles/comments; that filling in your Top Skills section will “explicitly pick the skills you want to contribute to”; and a refresh of linkedin.com/advice that makes it easier to find and contribute to articles.
