The ranking power of Medium & Quora can push them to the top of different SERPs. Many webmasters have thought about using sites like this for their SEO efforts.
These sites tend to nofollow links but Google has said they reserve the right to ignore the nofollow tag, so maybe there is some link benefit. These sites tend to have an active user base so they could be developed into an alternative traffic source to become less reliant on Google. Another issue is potentially duplicate content.
So is there enough SEO benefit to give away content on these big sites? Do you think there are enough direct or indirect benefits? What do you think is the best way to use these sites (keyword ideas, content research, audience development, brand building, etc)?
