Zvents just pinged me that they have raised $24 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, AT&T and NAVTEQ. Zvents is an aggregator of local events information and they syndicate their data out to publishers such as newspapers like the Denver Post and portals like MSN’s City Guides.
So why should you care?
When it comes to local search and local SEO there are few more potent categories than events. Since there are always new events to publish, they offer a publisher a daily opportunity to capture new search traffic. And by coupling Zvents data with a strong domain such as a local newspaper, these publishers can typically rank at the top of the search engines for specific event searches.
While Zvents seems to be focused on large publishers as partners, even if you are a small site it might be beneficial to put a local event feed up. For example, a local plumber could display a list of all of the upcoming home improvement shows, etc.
2 Response Comments
We have been studying Zvents for a few years now and agree that the content is great and had only gotten stronger. My question for you is on the issue of duplicate content. How will this affect the sites that are carrying the same content. Can this have a negative SEO affect?
James,
From what I have seen, if you have a strong domain (like Denverpost.com) and you use Zvents, you will likely outrank Zvents for their content. If you have a weak domain then that probably won’t be the case. I haven’t seen this kind of stuff having much of a negative SEO effect. If you have a weak domain, instead of ranking #1 in G, you might rank #10 or #20 or something like that.