Fanpop! is a very useful site in spite of the silly name. It is not essentially a fan site, it is a place where people with special interests gather in groups to share and rate links, participate in discussions, read news headlines and more. It is a typical Web 2.0. invention that might prove to be more than a fad.

Find your fan spot
Because of the activities of its members, Fanpop! is actually a steadily increasing collection of portals, called fan spots. Some cover traditional fan site topics, like Tomb Raider and The Beatles. But there is a surprising variety of spots.

I have joined the search engine optimization spot and the sushi spot and admit to being quite fascinated.

You can search for spots related to your interests, or you can browse the fan spot channels — a directory type interface. Browsing the channels, you can see the number of links and fans in the fan spots. They are both good indicators of the activity and consequently the reliability of a spot.

How it works
Every fan spot has a links tab where you can add, tag, rate and comment links. You can also report a link as spam, broken, outdated, duplicate or miscategorized.

The links spot might prove to be the most valuable part: In a spot that has been active for a while, you get a collection of highly relevant quality links that can be sorted by date, tags or content type (e.g. article, blog, tool, etc.)

Then there is a tab for headlines, which are taken from sources like Google News, Topix.net, and About.com. There is no way of rating or tagging these.

Each spot has also its own forum tab. However, these forums are not very active — yet.

At the bottom of the page there is a box named “More on the web”. It contains links relevant entries from Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and Google. There is also a box showing related spots, which aren’t always very relevant.

Is it any good?
Fanpop! is still in beta, so it is too early to say for certain how useful it will prove to be. There are scores of similar services out there, like Orkut for community and discussion and Digg and Delicious for sharing news and links. Fanpop! has an interesting mix of features, though.

What will make or break it, is the way they handle their users. It seems to me that Fanpop! are acutely aware of this, and they have arranged for different ways to reward active users. Top fans — particularly active users — are paraded on the front page. Fans who contribute a lot to their spots are awarded medals, and with the medals come privileges. If the links you add are highly rated and the forums you start inspire lively discussions, you get access to editing the links and tags in your spot.

This system has the potential to create a top caste of contributors, who gain the trust of their fan spots and boost the quality of the contents. It is early days still, but the spots with a broad fan base and some very active users can prove to be interesting gateways to specialized topics on the web.

Fanpop and SEO
Can you use Fanpop to get inbound links? Of course, and a link from Fanpop will probably generate traffic.

Wannabe spammers should note though that Fanpop uses redirects, though. Your real URL is not included in the link on their pages and a link from Fanpop will therefore not increase your pagerank or your search engine rankings.

(Or, to be more precise: Fanpop has included the real URL as a “title” field in the URL tag. You may see it if you hover your mouse over the link. We doubt that the search engine crawlers will follow such links, though, although they may in the future, if they find that Fanpop is able to filter out low quality pages and sites.)