Daily Magazine

The following interview is with Dave Gowel, who has been recognized as a “LinkedIn Jedi” by Inc.com and the Boston Globe, is the CEO of RockTech, and author of The Power in a Link: Open Doors, Close Deals and Change the Way you do Business Using LinkedIn (Wiley, December 2011). Gowel co-founded RockTech with Mark Rockefeller to build software tools that help corporations increase productivity through quicker adoption of underutilized technologies. The interview has been edited for clarity.

A lot of people see LinkedIn as a recruiting or job hunting network. What are some of the other ways professionals can put LinkedIn to work, once they’ve landed that dream job?

I think one of the key ways to think about it is really a relationship filter, that when you put in all the relationships that you already have, it allows you to see the ones that you could have more easily, or get information about potential ones...

The issue of duplicate content is a rather contentious one in the world of Search-Engine Optimization. There were for many years – and perhaps still to this day – myths floating round about duplicate content penalties.

Essentially, folks were told that if they produced duplicate content then they would be punished, and many thought that this meant you could not syndicate content, or post the same article on your site and another. Personally I think this was a ploy by Google to deter potential spammers.

You see, back when search engines first started to become popular, it was easy to rank in the top spots for your keywords by stuffing your website full of keywords. The black hat community used the same article on multiple pages and the search engines gave them good rankings. Thankfully, the algorithms are much more sophisticated these days and so are the users...