The New York Times ran a story on April 9th by Steve Lohr titled "
This Boring Headline is Written for Google" about newspapers altering their article's headline copy to make them more search engine friendly. The story explains that search engines like Google use the terms within headlines to help determine the topic of a given web page, so creating a headline that's keyword rich rather than a creative play on words could generate additional visitors to the article through search engines.
Welcome,
NYTimes.com, to the world of search engine optimization. Next time, try writing a headline for Google that's more relevant to the article's content.
While it's good to see that this well established web marketing strategy (search engine optimization, or SEO for short) is finally on their radar, let's take a look at how the New York Times - and newspapers in general - are continuing to shoot themselves in the foot by locking their archives.
Bloggers Drive Traffic Here are the top three traits I attribute to all popular bloggers:
1. They read a lot of news.
2. They make strong arguments.
3. They cite their sources.
Try clicking through to
read Lohr's article on search engine optimization. If more than a week has passed since it was published, it will probably cost you $3.99. Debating spending $3.99 for one news article when you can watch an entire episodes of Charlie Rose for $0.99 is a topic for another post. For now, let's look at the search engine optimization consequences of locking content.
Locking Content Hurts Link Popularity What's a blogger to do when they want to cite a historical source for a current blog post? Keep in mind that "historical" generally means a week or two old on newspaper websites. Will they link to the paid content or find another online source to cite supporting their argument?
For example, the NY Times search engine returns 37 article results for the query ["weapons of mass destructions" iraq] where "Judith Miller" had a by-line.
Only 5 of 37 articles written by Miller on this controversial topic are freely available to the public. Will the NY Times make more money at $3.95 per article, monthly/annual subscriptions to Times Select, or from advertising by opening their content up so bloggers can link to it, drive traffic to it, and search engines can index it?
Locking Content Costs Them Money 1. Search engine spiders don't whip out the plastic.
2. Bloggers don't link to content that requires a subscription to access.
3. Search engines use link popularity to determine how important a web site is.
If the content wasn't locked down, more bloggers and other sites would link to NYTimes.com news stories, search engines would index them, and that together would generate additional traffic to historical content.
Now, multiply that by the thousand and thousands of articles a newspaper publishes every year. As you might imagine, we're talking about a LOT of traffic. How much traffic? Well, consider this:
The NY Times returns 2,010,429 results for the term "the" and more than 99% of that content is hidden from search engines. Even a small trickle of traffic to each of those millions of articles really ads up.
So, when will the New York Times take their search engine optimization beyond keyword optimizing their soon to be locked down headlines?
