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February 21, 2005
Search Engine Optimization
Jay Rosen writes about About and the New York Times:
PressThink: A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com to the New York Times: I couldn't tell you if this page has the proper meta-data-- or any. My method of search engine optimization is to get a lot of links by writing something original and useful that people will elect to recommend at their own sites. It works. But only because links to PressThink don't expire.
'Frankly, they bring a lot of competencies to us. They're the leaders in search-engine optimization.' That's from an interview with Martin Nisenholtz, Senior Vice President for Digital Operations at the New York Times, who spoke with Staci Kramer of Paid Content about his company's recent acquisition of About.com for $410 million. In a conference call with stock analysts, Nisenholtz again mentioned search. He talked about 'some very useful synergies such as cross marketing and search optimization expertise.'... [T]he logic of this portion of the transaction intrigued me. They know how to show up in search; we don't. Let's buy them. Then we'll know too. 'We own you now. Tell us what you know.'
About.com is a network of about 500 mini-sites where people who know a lot about a subject--they're called 'guides,' but they could also be called bloggers--write columns and offer links and resources about specialty topics from personal finance to parenting to fly-fishing. The mini-sites are surrounded by ads--including 'cost-per-click' advertising--and sponsored links; that's where the money comes from.... Search engine optimization means the business of getting your site noticed by Google, Yahoo and other engines. Some firms claim to know how it works and will 'boost' your site for a price. But About.com is not in that business (a very shady business.) What About.com, and it's competitor, iVillage, know how to do is design pages that find their way into search engines, and thus have a second life.
Say you write the definitive guide piece on 'Is Your Sick Kid Too Ill To Attend School?' Naturally you want it to show up when Web users query for information on that subject. And putting keywords 'sick child stay home school' into Google brings up that page from About.com in the top ten results. According to Susan Mernit, a majority of About.com's readers find the company's content this way. They aren't subscribers, members or regular visitors. They get there through what is called 'natural' search. By contrast: "The New York Times, like most media sites, uses a content management system and a dynamic, cookied URL structure that means that only some landing pages and the home page get the presence in search results--and of course, the URLs for the news stories expire and move into the archive where they are walled off."
You rarely find New York Times articles in the top ten results of any Google search. The reason is simple: Search works by counting the quantity and quality of links to a page. In most cases, links to the New York Times expire after a week, the url's (web addresses) change, and the content moves behind a pay wall.... The second life of content, made possible by search, is of critical importance to journalists whose work is on the Web. (That's almost all journalists.) The very phrase 'on' the Web tells us that things may land on the surface of the network and not get woven into it. These stand a very poor chance of surviving and having a second life, where there are probably more readers available than in the first....
I have direct experience with this as a blogger. In the beginning, I was writing 'on' the Web-- meaning on its surface. Over time, as PressThink has embedded itself more into the Web, and become inter-linked with other sites, it has gained more and more traffic from 'natural search,' visitors who went to Google and found PressThink because when they looked up, say... Ted Koppel, there it was: my post from May 1, 2004, after Sinclair Broadcasting refused to run 'The Fallen.' (The number two result on Google when I wrote this. For Eason Jordan, PressThink was number three when I wrote this.) You can generate significant traffic that way.
Martin Nisenholtz spoke of it as a competence his firm was buying (and knew how to value): getting your content found by search engines and then ranked so that users find it.... I e-mailed him for more details about the search knowledge at About that he found valuable enough to mention in a conference call with analysts. This is what he told me:
About.com has built a long standing institutional knowledge in building pages that are easily read by the spiders the search engines use to build their databases. These techniques evolve over time, but include accurately titling pages, use of metadata, proper syntax of key content, providing machine-readable links, page formatting that doesn't interfere with machine automation and other like details which allow spiders to be able to accurately understand the content of the article.
Additionally, About.com maintains long-term relationships with the major search engines to ensure compatibility and accessibility to their databases as they undergo constant change. All of this ensures that the content is read and placed into the databases, but in the end, it is the quality of the content and the relevancy of the article that is most important in search.
In addition, because the guides are solely writing for the Internet consumer, they write in a style that is focused on the medium (links, lists, images, forums, etc.) Of course, most print and broadcast media companies do not do this, as the content is created primarily for offline use.
...'Indeed, demand for Internet advertising has grown so quickly that many media companies are finding themselves without enough Web pages on which to sell ads,' wrote James Bandler of the Wall Street Journal Friday. And they're finding themselves without much knowledge of how to show up in search. I'm a blogger, not a company. I couldn't tell you if this page has the proper meta-data-- or any. My search engine optimization method is to get a lot of links by writing something original and useful that people will elect to recommend at their own sites. It works (sometimes.) But only because my links don't expire.
On January 19, I wrote 'Bloggers Are Missing in Action as Ketchum Tests the Conscience of PR.' Much of it was based on facts and impressions in Stuart Elliot's 'Advertising' column, published the same day in the New York Times ('Public Relations Industry Debates Payments to Commentator') which I linked to and discussed.
Today if you put Ketchum 'Armstrong Williams' payments into Google, Elliot's column is not there at all. Nowhere on the first ten pages. PressThink was the number 2 result on the first page when I tried it, Editor & Publisher number one. Change it to Ketchum payments 'Armstrong Williams'--switching only the order of two terms--and the Washington Post story is the first result, and again Stuart Elliot's column is nowhere to be found.... The Elliot column couldn't embed itself in the Web, and sink proper roots. It's effectively 'gone.' From Elliot's point of view, he loses a potentially huge readership for his work. Can he afford it?
Right now there is little in the way of 'search engine optimization' at the New York Times. For Stuart Elliot's colleagues, the reporters and writers at the flagship of the American fleet, this means that, in the main, their work is lost to Google, lost to online forums and conversation, lost to the long tail where value is built up-- and in many ways lost to cultural memory.
Do they know this? Do they care about all the lost readers, and the lack of stickiness even their best work has on the Web? What, if anything, do they plan to do about these losses? To me it is one of the mysteries about the editorial staff at that great institution....
Posted by DeLong at February 21, 2005 08:41 AM
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Comments
Verry interesting.
Posted by: Sandals at February 21, 2005 10:08 AM
I didn't read it carefully, but they've gone to a lot of effort to put stuff behind a pay wall where people won't see it. I suppose that they are using About.com to direct people to their pay site, but most people doing research-by-Google are looking for free content. Seems clueless.
Google rankings are weird. I mentioned chlorocruorins once, and now I'm one of the experts.
Posted by: John Emerson at February 21, 2005 11:02 AM
I forget where I saw it (here?) but there was a suggestion about a month ago that the NYT was very quickly making itself obsolete by giving away its fresh content and walling off its old content. The proper formula would be the reverse: Let journalists and politicians and the like -- people whose jobs depend on knowing current events -- pay to get their news fresh, and let everybody else have it for free a day or a week later.
Posted by: Auros at February 21, 2005 11:29 AM
And $2.95 per article? Hello?
Posted by: Doug at February 21, 2005 11:31 AM
A related question: If a page's content is primarily pictures (not text) how does one make it more visible to Google?
Posted by: wetzel at February 21, 2005 11:39 AM
Wetzel: Make sure to say (IMG SRC="url" WIDTH="#" HEIGHT="#" ALT="text"). (With angle-brackets instead of parens, obviously.) I think some of the search engines do notice ALT text.
Posted by: Auros at February 21, 2005 11:44 AM
NYTimes is in a difficult position, because selling access to their articles through Nexis is a cash cow, and if they start giving away their archives they undercut Nexis and throw away all that income in one fell swoop. It's a big leap of faith to assume that revenues from online advertising will compensate.
The NYT is not unique in this respect; the LA Times doesn't give away full-text archives either. At least NYT and LAT make the full text available for a limited time. The WSJ doesn't even do that.
Also, the idea that Auros cites would never work. Most people want to know the *current* news, not yesterday's news. The lion's share of hits to NYTimes probably come through either their front page, or Google News (or some other news portal). If you cut off free access to current articles, you'd be dropping an enormous fraction of their page views, for the dubious benefit of getting a few more blog links (and not even that many --- most blogs, again, link to *current* news, and I would bet a large sum of money that there's an exponential dropoff as articles get older).
Posted by: Cog at February 21, 2005 11:53 AM
Wetzel,
There's a different audience using Google Images that will find those graphics.
Posted by: sm at February 21, 2005 01:15 PM
You are not distinguishing between the NYT management and it's writers. Their interests are different. The NYT managers want to keep the company income stream up as long as possible, and the writers want to keep their mindshare up so they can jump to the web later.
Do the writers make significant money off speaking at dinners and such? They might not have a long term plan involving staying writers for papers or the equivalent.
Posted by: walter willis at February 21, 2005 03:29 PM
[pointless]
Posted by: at February 21, 2005 09:41 PM
Last I looked, it was possible to create a permanent like to NYT content. There is a page at the Times web site for this; it generates a code that will stay the same and work even after the reffered-to content becomes pay-only. I haven't checked it recently, but I'd be surprised if it's gone away.
Posted by: Jonathan Goldberg at February 21, 2005 11:24 PM
It's still there, and the "After Matter" section of the Rosen piece mentions it, but it also notes that relatively few stories are permalinked.
Posted by: fling93 at February 22, 2005 03:24 PM
Oh, and for obvious reasons, the Google spider can't get to those permalinks through the NYT's website. :)
Posted by: fling93 at February 22, 2005 03:28 PM
Here's a funny one--I was fact-checking the spelling of Stuart Elliot's name, and stumbled on this site. NYT didn't rank at all on the first page!
Posted by: d3 at February 28, 2005 12:23 PM