Adam Sherk » Publishing

My Top Posts of 2011 on SEO, PR and Social Media for Publishers

Adam Sherk — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:15:29 +0000

As another year comes to a close I thought I’d finish off with a roundup of this year’s most popular posts. Original idea!

Nevertheless, here are my top 10 posts of 2011 by pageviews:

Also a special mention for a post from 2010 that continues to bring in considerably more pageviews than anything else:

The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases

Looking at my 2011 posts, it is interesting that a sports topic got the top slot since that’s not a major focus for me. I used to do team comparison posts with some frequency but I scaled back, mainly because the figures become outdated so quickly (and since social media is more than a numbers game). But several of my sports posts continue to drive traffic so maybe I’ll look for new ways to examine sports and social.

The post on Facebook analytics tools did well considering I just published it last week. Short, simple lists of tools and tips tend to get traction.

I also thought it was interesting that the eHow and Mahalo post was written just a couple weeks before the first Panda update. I guess that was a bit of foreshadowing.

I’m pretty sure the Kim Kardashian post made the list simply because it contains her name and photo. But I was trying to make a real point there, so I’ll take it.

In checking out Google Analytics one thing I like about my top 10 is there were multiple paths to success. For some it was search referrals, for others tweets or LinkedIn shares, and it some cases it was a link or links on other sites. It’s good to see some diversity.

Thank You

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to devote much time to blogging this year. Looking back I only averaged 2-3 posts per month.

The good news behind that is that Define Media Group, which split off from The New York Times Company a year ago, is doing well and there is plenty of client work keeping us busy.

Define is launching a company blog soon and we’ve also arranged to do some articles for Search Engine Land, so it will continue to be a challenge to keep up here. But I’ll give it a whirl.

I enjoy writing this blog, and having a personal outpost has offered a good way for me to connect and network with others in the industry.

For those of you that stop by to read a post, leave a comment or share something via social, I just want to say thanks. It is much appreciated!

Enjoy the holidays and hope you have a great 2012.

Hey, I Got the Lead Sentence in a Spammy Scraper Article

Adam Sherk — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:44:40 +0000

When I got a Google Alert that my name appeared in an article on NFL jerseys, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Perhaps a reference to one of my social media super bowl posts?

Nope! Instead it seems I’d been given the honor of being in the first sentence of a spam article that had scraped together a bunch of random content.

I’m not going to link to it but it was on a subdomain of bloglines.co.za.

I guess you have to admire the automated attempt to transition from enterprise social media strategies to buying NFL replica jerseys:

And at least the advertisement was well targeted to me since I’m interested in press release optimization and I’m a fan of PRWeb.

I also liked the ambitious effort to close the article with some extra links for buying property in Africa:

I even got rolled into a tweet promoting the article:

Jokes aside, it’s understandable how frustrated publishers and bloggers get with content scraping and article spinning. It really is an epidemic.

The Huffington Post’s Kim Kardashian Tag-o-Rama

Adam Sherk — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:33:04 +0000

While on The Huffington Post yesterday I couldn’t help but notice the large number of tags they’d added to a couple posts on the Kim Kardashian photos in W Magazine, and the rather “interesting” terms being targeted.

First on Kim Kardashian: W Magazine Showed ‘Full On Nipple’:

Then a link in that article led me to Kim Kardashian Goes NUDE For W Magazine:

That’s when the full-on tag-o-rama began.

In case you’re counting that’s 47 blog tags between the two posts targeting some pretty amusing terms. Can all those tags really help? In a word: no.

As I covered in my post on blog tag optimization this type of over-tagging has little SEO benefit and in the extreme it can even be a negative.

It’s certainly not helpful for users either. In the second post above the tags take up almost as much space as the actual editorial content. At best that’s a distraction; at worst it looks spammy.

The Huffington Post is a strong enough domain and brand to overcome the SEO and usability issues, but not every site is.

So my advice: take it easy on those blog tags.

My Top Posts of 2010 on SEO, PR and Social Media for News and Sports

Adam Sherk — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:13:25 +0000

Another year has passed and that means it is time for marketing blogs to do their obligatory top posts of the year roundups. Despite the cliché I like reading them because it is a good way to discover things I may have missed during the year. And on my own blog I’m certainly curious to know which posts brought in the most traffic this year.

So yes I’m joining the club.

Here are my 10 top posts of the year by pageviews:

The press release buzzwords post is the most popular post I have ever done by any measure. That one really took on a life of its own and it was fun to be a part of it. Six months later I am still getting engagement on it every now and then.

I thought it was interesting that three of my top 10 were related to sports and social media because I write about that only occasionally as a side interest. I guess I should step that up a little next year.

The iPad quotes post is just a simple roundup of thoughts from around the industry that barely got noticed on Twitter but it continues to bring in natural search visitors each month.

Another post not listed that did pretty well was News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers? A version that was republished on SocialTimes ended up being submitted to Digg and things took off from there. If my original had been submitted that would certainly have cracked into my top 10 overall.

I’d like to thank everyone who has engaged with my blog in some way this year be it a comment, link, tweet, Facebook like, LinkedIn or Google Reader share or just stopping by to read a post.

While I write this blog in my spare time for my own enjoyment it has become a valuable part of what I do professionally. So I am grateful for the connections I have made through it and I appreciate the positive feedback I’ve received.

Enjoy the holidays and have a great 2011.

Translation and Localization Tips for Publishers

Guest — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:41:21 +0000

This is a guest post from Christian Arno, founder of Lingo24, a global translation service. I asked Christian to provide some tips for publishers looking to expand their presence in international markets. – Adam

To reach an overseas readership online publishers must ensure that they properly localize their content. Here are a few issues to consider when localizing an online newspaper or magazine.

Translation

One of the pivotal processes when localizing your online publication is ensuring the content is properly translated.

Depending on your budget there are a couple of ways you can go about this. If your budget is limited you could use an online translation service like Google Translate. These services give fairly acceptable results but there is a risk that your translated copy will contain errors and inconsistencies. Which, let’s face it, won’t reflect well on you.

The only way to be sure you have a completely accurate translation is to use a professional translator. They will also be able to help you maintain the style, tone and voice of your publication.

Your editorial tone may well be an important factor in the success of your online publication so you want to be sure it persists when your content is translated.

Internationalize before you localize

Before attempting to localize your online publication you should make sure it is properly internationalized.

What does this involve? Basically it is the process of ensuring that your website is consistent with international standards by ensuring that the widest range of character sets are supported and ensuring that any regional settings are not hard-coded. Unicode’s UTF-8 for your text is a good starting point.

This preparatory work will ensure the localization process runs smoothly. LISA (The Localization Industry Standards Association) states that proper internationalization can save money: “Anecdotal evidence from many, many people over the years consistently indicates that proper internationalization reduces the cost of subsequent localization by about 50% and reduces the time needed for localization by about half.”

Localize images

As well as ensuring your written content is properly translated you may need to do some work to ensure your images, video and other visual content is localized. If your publication uses a lot of ‘people’ imagery it is important that it properly reflects the people of the country you are publishing in.

For example, if you are publishing a magazine about human resources management it might seem odd to readers in Japan if all the images depict European workers.

Add local content

Many publications will syndicate the major features and articles from their most important journalists across all their websites, which makes their publication consistent across different regions and helps to establish an international brand. However, they can also provide some regional content that is only available to local readers. This helps to engage readers within the target region and adds an element of trust and familiarity.

The amount of local content you can provide will depend on your resources and if you have access to any local journalists. Even if you don’t have local staff you could use freelancers or source content from local news agencies.

Cultural differences

When you publish your online newspaper or magazine in other countries you need to be aware of cultural differences. These can include different attitudes to moral and ethical issues, political opinions and attitudes towards power and authority.
Even seemingly mundane things like the way numerical data is formatted need to be considered. For example, some parts of the world prefer imperial weights and measures (e.g. pounds, ounces, feet and inches), whereas elsewhere the metric system (e.g. kilograms, grams, metres, centimetres) is the norm.

And whilst the UK and US would structure a number like this: 1,000,000.00, many parts of Europe (e.g. Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Sweden), would write it like this: 1.000.000,00. Indeed, some countries (e.g. France, Croatia, Poland and Finland) don’t use any thousands separator at all and would write it thus: 1 000 000.00.

Beware of local laws

All journalists and editors must be well versed in the laws of their own country to avoid issues of libel, defamation, copyright, sub judice, censorship and the like.

Equally when you are localizing your online newspaper or magazine you must ensure that you are acting within the laws of the regions you are publishing in. For example, some countries have far stricter rules on censorship and free speech than others. If your publication has a political bent you must ensure that you are not infringing these types of rules.

Using social media

Social media is now an integral part of most online publications. When you are localizing your newspaper or magazine make sure you are using social media appropriately for the region you are targeting.

This means researching which social networks are popular within the region. For example, while Facebook and Twitter dominate the USA and many other Western countries, in China the most popular networks are RenRen.com and Kaixin001.com. Russia likes Vkontakte.ru whilst Brazil has a slight leaning towards Orkut.

Once you have established which networks to target for your promotional activity make sure you are aware of local social media etiquette and which marketing techniques work.

You should now have an idea of the planning and research that is required to take your online magazine or newspaper to an overseas readership. It’s not an over-complicated process and is easily achievable, even if your resources are limited.

Christian Arno is founder of global translation service and localization company Lingo24. With 150 full-time employees working across three continents, and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 achieved a turnover of $8m USD in 2010.

Which News Sites Have the Highest Reading Level According to Google?

Adam Sherk — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:17:22 +0000

I saw Malcolm Coles’ post on Google’s reading level scores for UK newspapers and thought it would be fun to do the same thing for US news sites. Last week Google released a new search filter that allows users to refine search results by reading level. So what reading level does Google assign to major news sites in the US?

I was going to look at top 25 US newspapers online according to Journalistics but I decided to include a wider variety of news sites. So instead I pulled out the US news sites from my comparison post on news site social media engagement to come up with a sampling of newspapers, magazines, TV, wire services and Web-only news organizations.

How do the US news sites stack up? Google assigns the majority of content on all of them an intermediate reading level which makes sense since that level appeals to the widest audience. But which sites are aiming high or low?

Among the news organizations I checked, here are the sites with the greatest percentage of content at a basic or advanced reading level:

Most Basic Content

ABC News 41%
Boston.com 29%
CBS News 28%

A commentary on mainstream TV news? There’s probably a joke about Boston residents here too but I’m not touching that.

Most Advanced Content

Bloomberg Businessweek 11%
The New York Times 7%
Reuters 7%

Bloomberg Businessweek has a much higher percentage of content at an advanced reading level than any of the other sites. Must be some smart folks over there.

Here are all the scores. The sites are arranged alphabetically:

ABC News

AOL News

Boston.com

Bloomberg Businessweek

CBS News

CNN

The Christian Science Monitor

Forbes

Fox News

The Huffington Post

Los Angeles Times

MSNBC

Newsweek

NPR

The New York Times

Reuters

Slate

Time

UPI

USA Today

The Wall Street Journal

The Washington Post

Yahoo! News

7 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for Publishers

Guest — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:17:45 +0000

This is a guest post from Paras Chopra, founder of Visual Website Optimizer. Paras has been doing some interesting work with A/B testing and conversion rate optimization so I thought it would be good to get some tips for publishers from him. – Adam

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is perhaps the easiest method to increase revenue without pouring extra dollars into paid marketing campaigns. For readers who aren’t familiar with the terminology, CRO consists of moving around and changing different elements on a website to increase conversion rate (signups, downloads, engagement, sales, etc.). As the director of Visual Website Optimizer (A/B testing software) I have had the opportunity to observe hundreds of A/B tests by our (publisher) customers and analyze what works for them.

In this post I will detail conversion rate optimization tips for publishers and media sites. For general best practices for all websites you may want to check my post on conversion rate optimization tips for landing pages.

Define your conversion goals

For most publishers the conversion goal is usually a click on an advertisement. In other words ad revenue is what publishers aim to optimize. However, for a specific visitor on a specific page the aim is not just optimizing for immediate revenue. As a publisher you should instead optimize for lifetime ad revenue generated by a visitor. Granted it is harder to measure than Click Through Ratio (CTR) and other simpler metrics but lifetime ad revenue will definitely force you look at conversion rate optimization in a different light.

To increase lifetime ad revenue you essentially need to optimize for three specific goals:

Increasing CTR on your content pages (so that visitors click on ads more often)
Increasing visitor engagement on your pages (so that visitors browse more pages per session)
Increasing content distribution (so that visitor shares your content on social channels)

I will outline how to optimize for each of these goals individually. Note that even though these are practices have been shown to work I recommend doing an A/B split test before implementing them directly.

Tips to increase CTR / clicks on advertisements

Ads in the sidebar don’t work – let’s face it, people have significant ad blindness. Made popular by blogs, ads in the sidebar get pathetically low CTRs. In fact, sidebars provide an easy filter for your readers to ignore practically everything contained in them. So you need to get creative with your site layout and ad placement. You should avoid placing ads at traditional locations such as header and sidebar.
Ads inside the content work best – you know why print advertising is still flourishing? Because magazine/newspaper readers have no option to ignore ads that are interspersed with actual stories / articles. Similarly, in the online world publishers that embed ads within content (say in the middle) get much higher CTRs. Of course you must ensure that it does not adversely impact the user experience (because you are optimizing for life time ad revenue, not just CTRs).
Use a mix of display ads and textual ads – having multiple display ads on a single page results in all of them competing for visitors’ attention. Instead, you should have multiple textual ads and a single display ad (which stands out on the page). Thanks to contextual advertising, text ads have become incredibly well-targeted to the content on the page. Moreover, by nature of being text-only such ads blend well in the article and actually catch visitor’s attention as they scan or read your content.

Tips to increase visitor engagement

It’s all about content recommendation – as soon as a visitor is done reading your content you should recommend other interesting articles on your site. It’s hard to get the recommendation process right – some sites fail to do it or others include too many links at random. Ideally you should present only one or two recommendations for the most relevant articles and the recommendation process should catch visitors’ attention. The New York Times slides in an article recommendation as soon as you are done reading a story (shown above). It’s a great way to make sure visitor notices it.
Don’t ask users to create an account just to comment – many publishers make the mistake of forcing a visitor to create an account to do even basic activities on site like rating an article or commenting. This is a serious hindrance to having visitors interact and engage with your site. The majority of the functionality of your site should not require a login (including buying a subscription!)

Tips to increase content distribution

Prove to visitors that the content is worth sharing – nothing inspires a visitor to share a piece of content more than the proof that many others have found it helpful and shareworthy. You have to treat your content as something you are selling to visitors with the currency being their time and access to their friends / colleagues. You have to show social-proof to your readers which can be in the form of a widget displaying “1267 people liked it” or “900 people tweeted about it.” In fact, you can even have something as simple as an internal rating system that shows stats such as “96 people found this article helpful and would recommend it to their colleagues, would you? Yes / No.” People want to know that they are not alone in liking a piece of article and that it is OK to share it with their network.
Make it easy to share – you should try to remove all friction between your visitors and their social networks. There are plethora of widgets available that make it very easy to implement this functionality on a media site. However, be aware of the mistake that many media sites make in implementing social sharing. They tend to include many different social networks which does two things: a) adds to visual noise on page; b) confuses people and makes it hard for them to locate the social network of their choice. Instead you should research your target audience, see where they participate online and include just one or two large widgets for sharing. In many cases, especially with Facebook and Twitter, these widgets also double as “social-proof” because they show how many people have shared a particular piece of content.

Conclusion

To reiterate, as a publisher or media site you have three goals to optimize for:

CTR
Visitor Engagement
Content Distribution

If you manage to optimize these three goals, you will see total ad revenues from the site increase steadily. Good luck!

Paras Chopra is the founder of Visual Website Optimizer, the World’s Easiest A/B Split and Multivariate Testing Software. Made for marketers who hate technical & integration issues, Visual Website Optimizer makes A/B testing dead-simple by providing an easy-to-use interface, WYSIWYG editor and tag-less integration. This means no messing with HTML or JavaScript code and that tests can be ready to run in less than 5 minutes.

Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words

Adam Sherk — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:23:55 +0000

The discussion around my post on press release buzzwords has brought my attention to a variety of resources on language and writing, the latest being a new book called Wordcatcher.

Long before getting involved in marketing communications I was a kid who grew up loving stories and more specifically words.

The stories found in books, articles, songs, poems – you name it – have an amazing ability to conjure up entirely new worlds around us. And the primary vehicle of the storyteller is words. The right word in the right place is an incredibly powerful tool and some words just have a way of jumping off the page at us.

In Wordcatcher author Phil Cousineau explores the derivation of 200 or so words that have jumped out at him over the years. A lifelong lover of words, Cousineau has spent decades collecting and exploring the ones that fascinate him.

In the book he focuses on words with surprising derivations and those that are “fun to say…or mellifluous to hear.” Each word gets about a half-page entry digging into the history and usage of the term along with some companion words.

Bamboozle, bandersnatch, false friend, frizzle, heckle and honeymoon – there are all kinds of interesting tidbits to learn.

For example:

Kibosh is an old Gaelic word referring to the Irish funeral practice of putting a black cap on the deceased. So to “put the kibosh” on something is to declare it as good as dead.
Nostalgia was coined in 1688 by an Austrian medical student who joined two Greek words to describe the longing for home of Swiss soldiers stationed in the mountains.
Pun comes from the Anglo-Saxon “punion” meaning “to pound.” So a pun’s play on words is arrived at by beating them into new senses, as Walter William Skeat once said.

I could share more of the “word stories” but I wouldn’t want to take away the fun of exploring them for yourself.

It’s a great read and I enjoyed Cousineau’s introduction almost as much as the book itself because it paints a vivid picture of how he became fascinated with words.

For those of us who spend all too much time muddling through marketing copy, Wordcatcher is a wonderful reminder of the magical qualities of words.

What Horrible Things Did Time Magazine Do in 1964?

Adam Sherk — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:31:34 +0000

Was Time magazine “scurrilous and utterly shameless in its willingness to distort” in 1964?

In a used bookstore over the weekend I came across some old issues of Fact: magazine. I’m not familiar with Fact: but Wikipedia tells me it was published from 1964-1967 and edited by Ralph Ginzburg and Warren Boroson.

The cover of the very first issue caught my eye; it is full of quotes from people disparaging Time:

Here is the full page illustration opposite the article in which Time is called “The Weekly Fiction Magazine”:

And here is an excerpt from the opening of the article:

To quote the first paragraph (bolding is mine):

“Time’s technique for handling news is so simple that it seems to have eluded several generations of critics – and yet it is almost solely responsible for (A) Time’s monumental commercial success and (B) Time’s equally monumental failure in the fields of ethics, integrity and responsibility.”

The article goes on to chronicle all sorts of alleged malpractices by Time with quotes from a variety of figures.

So what was up with Time magazine in 1964? I have a feeling this article reveals more about the style and approach of Fact: than the practices of Time but I found it very interesting nonetheless.

As a side note, Define provided consulting to Time.com for several years. So I have first-hand knowledge that they seem pretty ok nowadays.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the comments for more background from people with knowledge of both publications at that time, including Fact’s Warren Boroson.

Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter

Adam Sherk — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:32:15 +0000

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has published the results of its latest survey on news consumption and related topics. The content on search engines and social media gets a little lost among all the stats and charts so I thought I’d summarize that data here.

Search Engines

34% of the public now use search engines to find news at least three days a week, up from 19% in 2008.
Yahoo and Google were among the most frequently mentioned websites for online news, indicating that users see them as sources for news (be it original reporting or aggregation) and not just search vehicles.

Social Media

19% of the public regularly (7%) or sometimes (12%) get news or news headlines through social networking sites. Only 3% regularly or sometimes gets news from Twitter.
24% of Twitter users follow news organizations or individual journalists, compared with 16% of social networking users.
Among social network and Twitter users, fewer share news than receive it. 21% of social networking users regularly (4%) or sometimes (17%) share news. 15% of Twitter users regularly (6%) or sometimes (9%) share news.

For the full findings on search engines and social media see section two of the Pew report.

Why the News Business Isn’t Profitable

Guest — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:09:05 +0000

This is a guest post from Aaron Goldman, author of Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google. Aaron is doing a blog tour in support of the book launch (covering 30 blogs in 10 days) which I thought was an interesting concept. I’ve been through the book and it’s a good read; for more information check out GoogleyLessons.com. – Adam

The traditional news business, as we have known it, is dead. OK, maybe not dead. But dying a quick death. It’s simply no longer profitable for companies to report “news.”

There’s too much overhead and too little immediacy. But, even for online news outlets — where overhead is low and immediacy is high — there’s too little commercial mindset.

In my book, Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google, I share 20 “Googley Lessons” that marketers can learn from the world’s most ubiquitous brand to better engage customers and prospects.

The lesson of chapter 4 is Mindset Matters. Among the many reasons the Big G has become so successful is that ads on Google reach people at a time when they’re in a commercial mindset.

Where do you turn when you’re comparing phone plans? Looking for the closest copy shop? Or trying to find a handyman?

You just Google it, right?

Of course, Google is also the first place people turn when they’re looking for the latest news, sports, weather or other categories traditionally served by the “news” media.

But it’s those commercial queries that are so desirable to advertisers.

When people search, they’re in between places on the web. They’re going form point A to point B. That’s a great time to reach people with a commercial message. When they’re already consuming content, it’s too late. They don’t want to hear from you.

No wonder Google’s making over $20 billion a year in ad revenue.

To be sure, Google — and search marketing in general — is not the only way to reach people in a commercial mindset. It’s just the best way, so far.

However, people spend just 5% of their time online searching. Over 40% is spent with content. Accordingly, there are limited opportunities for marketers to reach people via search.

So what is a traditional news media outlet to do? How can it position itself to capture the “next” dollar from the ad budget after search is maxed out?

Look at AOL. The company has remade itself into a new era media firm by eliminating a lot of the overhead associated with producing content — via Seed.com — and focusing on topics that are more commercial in nature — travel, finance, auto, etc — rather than news.

Accordingly, AOL has (once again) become an important venue for advertisers while also reaping the benefits of strong search rankings — after all, people are searching for all that commercial content. It should come as no surprise that AOL went this route considering a number of its top execs (Tim Armstrong, Jeff Levick, etc.) came over from Google.

So, to all those publishers out there who built their businesses on news. The time has come to reinvent. The time has come to get Googley!

Borrowing Content Was Happening Long Before Blogging

Adam Sherk — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:43:27 +0000

I was reading Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s piece on his time at Newsweek in the 1970s and this passage caught my attention:

For me, Newsweek was like an upside-down journalism school, where I learned an astonishing number of bad habits, e.g., having someone else check your facts. We poached material constantly, from newspapers, from other publications — even from Time. Copying from Time was a fact-checker’s dream, because we knew they took accuracy very seriously over there.

It sounds a lot like the practices of some industry blogs and news aggregators today. So “borrowing” content isn’t a Web-only phenomenon it’s just a lot easier to spot now.

Shifting from poaching content to paying for it, it really is no wonder that the AP seems so threatened by Google. A wire service’s whole business model is built around selling the same content to as many news outlets as possible. That works great in print and broadcast but not so much online. Actually it would work online, if not for search engines giving users access to everything in one place and filtering out duplicate content to improve their experience. What’s a news agency to do?

The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?

Adam Sherk — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:27:43 +0000

The cease and desist letter and the ensuing war of words between The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman and Newser’s Michael Wolff is getting a lot of industry attention this week. To me the real question is: when one site aggregates another’s content, how much attribution is enough?

The value and legitimacy of content aggregation is a topic for another post; I think most would agree that curation serves a more useful purpose than aggregation. But for better or worse content aggregation is a big part of online news dissemination today and I wouldn’t expect it go away any time soon. With that in mind, it is important that aggregators adhere to some basic rules of conduct: a) create their own summary text, don’t just “borrow” from the original and b) properly credit original sources through attribution links.

To see what type of attribution Newser is providing, I picked a random article from the sources grid on their home page today: Oprah Ditches Daytime for New Evening Show.

In this particular case the original article on the Wall Street Journal is linked to both inline and in the “Sources” section of the sidebar:

Two links is good attribution; I think that qualifies as giving proper credit to the original source. But as pointed out by The Wrap, Newser does not always do this. In looking at a selection of other articles in some cases only the “Sources” sidebar link is provided; The Wrap has also claimed that sometimes no attribution link was provided at all.

Personally I think aggregated stories should always include an inline attribution link. A sidebar link may not get proper attention from either users or search engines so a link should be placed within the actual editorial content.

The Wrap is also looking for attribution on Newser’s source grid. To quote Sharon Waxman:

“All we really want is for Newser to stop pissing on our leg and tell us it’s raining. Very simply: put in credit and links where they are missing. Add a Wrap homepage link to the source grid page. Make it simple and logical to get to actual Wrap content from that page.”

Here is part of The Wall Street Journal source grid linked from that Oprah article:

This is basically a section front on Newser so it is understandable that they are linking to their own articles. But this also shows how Newser is pushing aggregation to the extreme. It is one thing to occasionally aggregate stories from various sources that you think will be of interest to your readers. It is another to mass-aggregate content from a specific publication and then package it on a hub page, even customizing the URL and title tag for SEO:

For what it is worth, Google does not seem to be assigning much value to the page. It has a toolbar PageRank score of 1, and at least in my Google results it is not in the top 50 for “Wall Street Journal.” It is on page one for “Wall Street Journal news summaries” and page two for “Wall Street Journal summaries” but according to the Google Keyword Tool neither of those phrases has any search volume:

UPDATE:
Here’s the video of the “discussion” between Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff on CNN’s Reliable Sources (April 11, 2010). It’s safe to say they don’t get along:

Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much

Adam Sherk — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:01:41 +0000

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was on Fox Business yesterday talking about the business model for media content on the Internet.

Here’s what he said he had to say about search engines:

“Search on the Internet, whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, is free. And they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content, such as Wall Street Journal or whatever, and what they call their scraper, and they use it for search. It gives them their raw material for nothing. And then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it. We don’t get any of that. They are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead, but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.

“They say, ah yes but because when somebody searches for something and a page comes up for a newspaper it’s registered as a unique visitor and you sell your own advertising along side that. But that is nothing like a, that’s peanuts, compared to the cost of producing a real quality newspaper. And we just need to…it’s not a question of old media vs. new media or anything like that. We’re a new media company in many many ways, look at Avatar, that’s new media.”

So Avatar good, Google bad.

It might not hurt to remember though that search engines send news sites A LOT of quality, monetizable traffic every single day, for free. Natural search can account for 10-20% of a news site’s total traffic, sometimes even 30-40%, so maybe it’s not such a bad relationship after all.

AOL Newsroom: A Model for the Future or Shades of 2001?

Adam Sherk — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:37:13 +0000

There is an interesting article in BusinessWeek on how AOL is utilizing software and analytics data in an effort to match content with user interests and monetize it more successfully.

Are you sure you want to write that article, Dave?

Is this a good thing? Done right, I say absolutely. As I’ve covered in past posts on monitoring hot search trends and dealing with seasonal dips in search traffic, news sites can leverage tools and data to gain powerful insights into what’s working and not working on their sites. This information can also be used to find the areas where editorial coverage and user interests most overlap, ultimately resulting in more traffic, pageviews and time on site.

Now that doesn’t mean that the tools should rule the roost, and applying these practices to the extreme of Demand Media or AOL’s SEED is a slippery slope. Standards of quality and editorial voice must be maintained, and news organizations in particular play a more important role in society than simply manufacturing content for the sake of making money from it.

But there is no reason not to use tools and data to help make smart business – and editorial – decisions. If news organizations can’t stay in business, they won’t be playing any role at all.

10 Quotes on the Apple iPad and the Business of News

Adam Sherk — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:40:16 +0000

Now that the first wave in the Apple iPad crazy-a-thon has past, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of what people are saying about the iPad from the perspective of the news media.

You can view this in the spirit of Robert Scoble’s To create or curate?, or catch on that I’m on a project deadline and don’t have time to contribute my own thoughts.

Either way, here are 10 quotes that caught my attention on how the iPad will impact news organizations from a business or design perspective:

“The business side of the equation will be complicated. Apple has proven over and over that when it comes to media, part of having a simple interface with consumers is having a simple price plan. Publishing companies can’t expect to offer customized pricing on separate devices – one price for Kindle, another for the tablet, and still another for people arriving on computers – and not be buried in a wave of second guessing.”
-David Carr, The iPad: A Media Machine That Opens Up a New Front

“Most important for the e-reader debate, total online ad revenues have remained a small part of newspapers’ bottom line — no more than 10% in 2009, an especially discouraging figure considering that newspapers have had a decade to work on boosting online ad revenues. The question, then, is whether newspaper publishers will do any better at monetizing mobile advertising than they have online. Again, some back-of-the-envelope math suggests they won’t.”
-Erik Sass, News Analysis: Even Apple Can’t Save Newspapers

“Editors have been telling us for years that people won’t read long stories online. Yet they will read 1,000-page novels on their Kindles. What will they be willing to read on their iPad? I predict the return of long-form journalism. At the same time, visual storytelling will take deeper, richer forms. Information design will be more important than ever. Something like New York’s Approval Matrix that we designed back in 2005 with Adam Moss is popular in print but will really come to life in this format. Some people might subscribe to it all by itself.”
-Luke Hayman, Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design

“One sticking point for publishers has been whether they will have direct access to customer data, which they would use to sell renewals or related magazines and to tell their advertisers about their audience. (That is one reason why major publishers joined a consortium, announced in December, that would offer a storefront for digital magazines.)”
-Stephanie Clifford, Condé Nast and Time Inc. Cheer iPad; Others Have Doubts

“Has the iPhone changed the traditional print media business? Not at all — unless you think selling an app for your publication (as Conde Nast has for GQ) is a game-changer. Yes, the New York Times app looks impressive, with video that plays right inside the newspaper display (although you can do that on the NYT web site, too). But will a fancier app change the nature of the newspaper business or the magazine business? No.”
-Mathew Ingrim, Will the iTablet help the media? Possibly. Save the media? No.

“The future of news is about distributing content as widely as possible and monetising not just content but relationships. Devices will be a big part of that, but they’re not the answer.”
-Patrick Smith, Why the iPad isn’t the saviour of journalism as we know it

“But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.”
-Jason Kincaid, The Tablet Could Spur A Media Revolution, But It Will Be Out Of Apple’s Hands

“But the iPad, as we know it today, doesn’t change any of the fundamental economics of news commerce. On the iPhone, you can sell news apps through the App Store; you can upsell specific pieces of content to people within your apps; and you can sell advertising within those applications. (Apple takes chunks of the revenue from those first two options.) On the iPad, you can…do those same three things. The only thing that has changed is the size, and that big beautiful screen. Will people who weren’t willing to buy news on an iPhone be sold on the idea just because the text is bigger and the photos are prettier? I’d be surprised. The commerce proposition hasn’t changed.”
-Joshua Benton, So it’s called the iPad: Five thoughts on how it will (and won’t) change the game for news organizations

“The iPad makes the promise of integrated storytelling possible. (Yeah!) The Web has held that promise, but it is still often clunky. (Boo!) The good news is that the iPad isn’t locked to HTML (Yeah!), but what it will use within the iPhone operating system is unclear. (Hmmm) The New York Times app shown at the release looks great, with embedded video. How it was built is not yet public. The fabulous Sports Illustrated tablet demo was built with Adobe Air and Flex, which don’t play on the iPhone OS. Most online multimedia is built in Flash, which doesn’t play on the iPhone OS. Most audio slides shows are built in Flash. Most online video is encoded as Flash video, which — you guessed it — doesn’t play on the iPhone OS. So while it holds a lot of promise for better user interaction, figuring out a whole new platform, how to design for it and integrate our content management systems with it is going to be a big challenge for news organizations. (Sigh.)”
-Regina McCombs, What Apple’s iPad Means for Journalism Design, Multimedia & Business

“My guess is that the truly revolutionary content is not going to come from the old-guard publishers. It’s going to come from new guys, kids who have grown up digital. This notion of mashing together elements comes naturally to them. And somewhere out there, a genius is waiting to be discovered — the Orson Welles of digital media, someone who will create an entirely new language for storytelling. If you’re reading this, Orson Jr., please get in touch. I’ve got something I want to show you. Okay? Peace.”
-Fake Steve Jobs, Tablet Part Two: The true significance of the Tablet

As additional commentary emerges in the days to come, I’ll update this post with links to more good pieces.

Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall

Adam Sherk — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:22:14 +0000

Today The New York Times made it official that they will be introducing a metered model starting in 2011. There is additional information in the NYTco press release, and Jim Romenesko and others have published the staff memo.

Since the NYT is giving themselves a year to work out the details before implementing the paid model, there will be plenty of time for everyone to speculate on what should and shouldn’t be done, and how spectacularly it will succeed or fail.

But instead of that, I’m going to to give you the (completely fabricated) inside scoop on why The New York Times is really putting up a paywall, in the form of a Top 10 list:

Poisoning the cafeteria didn’t scare enough people into taking buyouts
The executive bathroom in Rupert Murdoch’s “Evil Publishers” Lounge is pretty sweet
They’re planning to launch their own portfolio of blogs that do nothing but aggregate their stories – seems to work for everyone else
They’ve spent all their resources trying to brainstorm a witty comeback to that piece The Daily Show did on “aged news” last year
Since they made the International Herald Tribune site disappear, why not their own?
The metered system will pay for itself by randomly charging one user per day $10,000,000
The editorial staff figures since hardly anyone will ever see their work, they can save time by skipping every other word
In 10 years Google will control every piece of information on the planet anyway, so why not make a little cash while they can?
Clicking their heels three times and saying “there’s no place like home” didn’t bring back the pre-Internet era
Waiting a year leaves enough time for the entire industry to collapse, so they won’t have to actually come up a system that works

As Bill Maher would say, “I kid the Times” (and if you can’t joke a little about your own parent company, who can you joke about?). However my comedic talents are limited, so please bail me out by suggesting more reasons in the comments.

On a serious note, only time will tell if a paid model will position the NYT to be successful well into the future or if it will ultimately hurt more than help. Most likely the result will fall somewhere in between. But whether you agree with their approach or not, the point is they are trying to find something that works.

The reality is that the industry is being radically re-invented by new technology, and there are no easy answers out there. Coming up with a viable metered model that still allows a wide audience to discover and interact with the content – in the ways that they prefer – is just one step on a challenging road ahead. I wish them the best of luck, and look forward to seeing how things unfold.

UPDATE:
For those interested in more actual information, NYTco. senior executives have answered a series of reader questions at: Talk to The Times: Answers About Charging Online

Help Haiti: News Sites Promote Ways to Donate

Adam Sherk — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:42:46 +0000

As the devastation and human tragedy caused by the Haiti earthquake grows, people are flocking to the news media for information, and more importantly to learn ways that they can help.

I’ve been impressed by how much attention the media has given to promoting ways that people can make donations. Aid organizations are racing against time to save as many lives as they can, and what they need most right now is money. Unfortunately there are increasing reports of donation fraud online, so major news organizations are playing a vital role in directing people to credible, legitimate groups.

Here are some of the news sites sharing information on how to donate to relief organizations helping the Haiti earthquake victims:

CNN – Impact Your World
The New York Times – Haiti Disaster Relief: How to Contribute
MSNBC – Haiti earthquake: How to help
Chicago Tribune – How to Help
BBC News – Haiti: How to help
NPR – Haiti: Some Ways To Help
Fox News – Haiti Earthquake Aftermath: How to Help
Newsweek – The Latest on Haiti and How to Help
The Huffington Post – Haiti Earthquake Relief: How You Can Help
The Washington Post – Organizations accepting donations to help Haiti
USA Today – How to help victims of the Haiti earthquake
Telegraph.co.uk – Haiti: how readers of this blog can help
Guardian – Organizations accepting donations to help Haiti
LA Times – Haiti: Resources and how to help
Forbes – How to Make Sure Your Donation Helps Haitian Earthquake Victims
The Wall Street Journal – Where to Donate — and How

I’m sure there are many more; if you know of any please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Social media users are doing their part too. Word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites (including The White House blog) has raised over $2 million to-date through mobile phone donations organized by mGive. And “Yele” is being frequently posted throughout the Web as users spread the word about Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation.

UPDATES:
Mobile phone donations have gone very well. As of January 18th mGive has raised $21 million and they are hoping to reach $30 million shortly, crediting repeated media coverage for the success of the effort.

CNN has launched Looking for Loved Ones in Haiti to help people trying to connect with missing family and friends. The Red Cross and Google also have tools for this purpose.

PEJ Study Shows Print Still Primary Source of Original News Reporting

Adam Sherk — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:03:41 +0000

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study today of the modern news ecosystem, examining a week of news activity in Baltimore, MD. You can get the details from the study itself but I wanted to point out a couple things that caught my attention.

Of the stories in Baltimore that week that contained new information 95% came from traditional media and the majority of that from newspapers:

So newspapers can pat themselves on the back for another day. But before we dismiss online and social media sources as nothing more than aggregators and promotion outlets let’s remember that this study reflects the state of the news ecosystem today. Things are just now beginning to shift as the economic viability of the current model is beginning to fail. New media can and will play an increasing role in original news reporting in the years to come.

Also this statement on the role of new technology in breaking news more quickly was interesting:

As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.

While many people regard press releases as little more than throw-away text the reality is that smaller news sources in particular do in fact use that content in full or repurposed form. Bill Hunt wrote about this a while back in looking at the use of tech press releases by bloggers. So companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype.

Hearst Skiff Reader Looks Cool

Adam Sherk — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:51:28 +0000

Hearst’s Skiff Reader is being unveiled at CES this week. My professional, analytical opinion is it looks pretty darn good.

I hope the much-discussed digital media consortium with Hearst, Time Inc, Condé Nast, Meredith and News Corp works out. It’s an interesting project and it is good to see publishers trying new things, however slow to move they may have been to-date.

While we’re at it here’s another look at Sports Illustrated’s tablet demo:

My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

Adam Sherk — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:50:51 +0000

I was going to post this last week but then opted wisely for letting myself enjoy a holiday break. Also I’ve only been blogging here for about six months so I’m still building up momentum. But since all the cool kids have been sharing their top posts I wanted to join in, plus follow my own advice on identifying your top trends.

Heck, if Brian Solis can put out 10 installments of his greatest hits for the year I can certainly come up with one.

So belatedly here are my 10 most popular posts of 2009, by pageviews:

I’m looking forward to making new connections and contributions this year and helping news and content sites to get the most out of their SEO and audience development efforts. Here’s wishing everyone an interesting and productive 2010.

Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

Adam Sherk — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:22:14 +0000

Today Google unveiled its Living Stories prototype, showcasing its vision of a new format for presenting news stories online. Essentially the idea is that for ongoing stories news organizations would maintain a single, consistent “living” URL that is continually updated with the latest developments.

Google has been collaborating with The New York Times and The Washington Post on the prototype; eight examples have been created to-date such as this Living Story on health care reform:

(click on the image to see a larger screenshot)

At first pass Living Stories sound a lot like topic pages which nearly every news site produces in some fashion now. But there is a fundamental difference between the two and Living Stories are ultimately a compliment to topic pages, not a replacement. Topic pages consolidate all of a site’s coverage on general, popular subjects such as specific news figures or companies. A Living Story takes it one level deeper by applying the concept to a specific story about that topic.

Unfortunately for him, Tiger Woods offers a good example of why news sites would want to use both. His current troubles are a perfect case for creating a Living Story since new developments continue to emerge in that story. But as big as the scandal is right now it certainly does not represent everything there is about Tiger. So sports news sites in particular will also benefit from having a Tiger Woods topic page that encompasses his entire career and provides users easy access to his latest news, stats, biography, etc.

In looking at the current Living Story examples one thing that struck me is that news sites will need to be careful not to pick subjects that are too broad to be effective. Stories like “The War in Afghanistan” or “The Struggle Over Health Care” do have a specific focus but it would be easy for those pages to try to cover too much and as a result become overwhelming to users.

So bottom line, are Living Stories a good idea?

Publishers will understandably be concerned about losing page views but a strong, consistent URL with frequent updates may well get more views (both on-site and via search referrals) than lots of scattered, separate articles would collectively. So I think it is a concept that is worth experimenting with. The main caveat being that Living Stories should ultimately be hosted on the actual news sites, not on Google.

For more information, see Principles of Living Stories and this video from Google:

UPDATE:
February 17, 2010 – Google News announced that the Living Stories code would be made open source to allow for more sites to experiment with the format. With the shift to the public phase of the experiment The New York Times and The Washington Post will no longer be updating their test pages hosted on Google Labs.

I Hope News Corp Does Block its Content from Google

Adam Sherk — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:51:32 +0000

More developments in the Rupert Murdoch vs. Google saga today, as the Financial Times reports that discussions have taken place between News Corp and Microsoft on an exclusive deal with Bing that would lead to News Corp blocking its news sites (such as The Wall Street Journal) from Google.

I’d actually like to see this happen…it would make for an interesting case study demonstrating that the only one hurt by such a deal is News Corp itself. It would also be interesting to see how Microsoft addresses the financial realities of trying to extend such an arrangement to a larger group of publishers.

Believe it or not, being indexed in Google and Google News is actually good for news sites.

Danny Sullivan has been covering the SEO aspects of this story in depth – these posts provide an overview of the key points better than I could summarize here:

Jeff Jarvis also has some good thoughts on the topic:

And Bill Tancer from Hitwise has pulled data showing just how important search engine referral traffic is to The Wall Street Journal and newspapers in general:

NewsPulse Gives CNN.com a New Way to Showcase Popular Content

Adam Sherk — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:03:04 +0000

One of the more promising features in this week’s relaunch of CNN.com is NewsPulse, which surfaces popular content in a simple, user-friendly interface:

(Click on the screenshot above to see a larger image)

NewsPulse makes it easy for users filter popular news by time period (from 15 minutes to 30 days), section and content type (articles vs. video). How “popularity” is determined is not specifically defined but it is likely a simple metric like page views.

One aspect that CNN might want to rethink is the inclusion of “Total Comments” for each news item. Since many stories do not appear to allow comments this results in quite a few “popular” stories with zero comments which sends a mixed message to users:

NewsPulse is still in beta so there’s likely to be some changes based on user activity and input. CNN.com is soliciting user feedback by including a prominent survey link at the top of the page:

It will be interesting to see how NewsPulse changes user behavior on the site over time. It has the potential to increase the number of stories read per visit resulting in more page views and time on site. Part of it will depend on how deeply users are willing to drill down with the interface. Personally I think the potential upside makes it well worth experimenting with. And CNN.com has wisely maintained the typical section front structure for users that prefer to interact with the site in that way.

Smart Move from Condé Nast: GQ and DETAILS Should Have Their Own Websites

Adam Sherk — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:20:41 +0000

There’s been a lot of coverage this week of Condé Nast bringing in McKinsey & Company to help them restructure the business which hopefully will work out for them. Props to Silicon Alley Insider for including a photo of the consultants from Office Space in their write-up.

Tuesday’s announcement that GQ and DETAILS will get their own sites in October is definitely encouraging and is a big improvement over hosting both on men.style.com. It’s not just that users expect a branded experience on a dedicated domain. It’s that there are so many SEO and audience development initiatives, including social media marketing, that simply work better when a site exists on its own unique, branded domain.

Best of luck to both GQ.com and DETAILS.com.

A side note to Condé Nast Digital’s PR team: I’d put your online press releases on regular Web pages. People will be less likely to link to the .pdf versions in your online press room. I did it above but I didn’t really want to.

The Daily Show Visits The New York Times

Adam Sherk — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:15:07 +0000

I couldn’t resist sharing this great video from The Daily Show of Jason Jones visiting The New York Times. The back-and-forth with Assistant Managing Editor Rick Burke about “aged news” is my favorite part.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

End Times

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

So Far so Good for Seattlepi.com

Adam Sherk — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:18:19 +0000

Hearst released some numbers this week on how things are going with seattlepi.com two months after moving to an online-only model.

From their statement:

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Keeping pace after an 80% reduction in staff is a good sign, although we don’t how well they monetized the April 2009 traffic compared to April 2008. And considering the print Post-Intelligencer no longer exists you would think the increase in unique visitors might have been higher, since the website is now the only way to get their content.

On All Things Digital, Peter Kafka is still skeptical about the viability of their model and whether they can make the numbers work in a local market. But you’d think these figures mean they’ve at least got a chance. So for now we can say so far, so good. Let’s hope things work out for them.

Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining

Adam Sherk — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:47:38 +0000

According to data released by Hitwise a few days ago News & Media is one of the few categories showing a YoY decline in share of search-referred traffic:

Fortunately the majority of sites we work with in this category are bucking the trend, as most are seeing strong improvements in YoY search engine referral traffic thus far this year.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of major publishers still get a huge portion of their traffic from direct navigation. So total natural search engine referral traffic is a more important measuring stick than what percentage of site traffic comes from natural search.

New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs

Adam Sherk — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:38:08 +0000

For anyone who’s been following the story of the shutting down of IHT.com and the migration of International Herald Tribune content to the New York Times Global Edition, there has certainly been criticism over the lack of permanent redirects from the old IHT.com URLs to the corresponding new URLs on NYTimes.com.

It’s understandable that people were puzzled by this move, and when a major site makes a critical mistake it doesn’t take long for it to be put in the spotlight. But there is usually more to the story, and for a number of reasons companies aren’t always at liberty to share all the information.

Fortunately this week The New York Times Chief Search Strategist Marshall Simmonds (disclosure: I work for Marshall) was able to make a statement to Search Engine Land to shed some light on the matter.

Here’s the text of his statement:

I wanted to bring you up to speed on the developments around the shuttering of the International Herald Tribune site, IHT.com, and archive transfer to the New York Times, nytimes.com.

The SEO team has been involved in the project since the beginning and recommended the implementation of one-to-one 301 redirects of all IHT content to its new location at the NYT.com. This, of course, conforms to best SEO practices when moving any content and was accepted and built into the timeline. We’ve moved plenty of content at the NYTimes before without incident.

As the project progressed, and we turned our focus to other matters, the move ran into several complications and a fast approaching deadline. Rather than consult with us, the IHT project team made a last minute decision and used an interim 302 solution without understanding the SEO implications.

After launch the impact was obvious, and we moved in to correct and educate. The NYT development team’s top priority right now is one-to-one 301 mapping of all IHT content to its new location. This, unfortunately, was a perfect storm of quick fixes and lack of attention to protocol and will be fully corrected in the coming weeks.

So the bottom line is, the NYT SEO team strongly advocated the use of permanent 301 redirects from all IHT.com URLs to the corresponding new URLs on NYTimes.com, and they are continuing to do what they can internally to get this implemented as soon as possible.

This situation also illustrates a key component of managing enterprise SEO initiatives. In large organizations with multiple properties spread out in various locations, there are a lot of stakeholders involved in every project, and a lot of factors involved in each decision. What’s best for SEO isn’t always what gets done, despite your best efforts and the good intentions of all the parties involved. Thus the process of making the case for SEO internally and educating on SEO best practices and the SEO implications of all site projects and processes never ends.