My colleague Joost wrote an excellent piece about newspaper SEO last week. I absolutely digg it, but did feel the urge to write a follow-up. This article is about some of the challenges newspapers face when trying to optimize their website’s content for search engines. It’s not a negative piece, because I do have some ideas to fix the problems I mention ;)
Many newspapers articles are created equal
Press agencies (like in the Netherlands the ANP) provide newspapers with a lot of content every day. Much of it gets published directly. Standard articles that are (usually) written for print find their way to several newspapers at once. Consequence: duplicate content issues. The newspaper that gets there first and has the most authority, will rank best. It’s not fair!
Rewriting all these articles for the web usually isn’t an option, because it’s labor intensive, costly, and slows publishing down. The simplest way to deal with this is to make decisions every day about which articles deserve to be rewritten, and for which you don’t bother. Also, if you want to rank for duplicate content against authorities like large newspaper websites, you have to win the battle elsewhere.
Old articles are indexed… Now what?
Another problem is this. Let’s assume you managed to open up a newspaper website to the spiders. Good! All articles within the archive are nicely connected to each other and start to rank really well. Think about what happens next. Old news is not news anymore: it has become history. Content that is not found on the frontpage is literally yesterday’s news.
Old articles are, well, nice for historians. But would YOU like it when you must wade through 2386745 Search Engines Results Pages with old articles before you’ve found the latest news? I would get frustrated, and I think I can safely assume that I’m not the only one. Newspapers should consider what happens when old articles suddenly start ranking well. They should be treated as old articles, not as new ones.
The magic word is CONTEXT. Put these old articles in some kind of navigational structure that immediately shows the user what the relationship is between this article and others that are alike. I’m thinking about dossiers here, about tagging, about related posts, etc. Also, what I (as an historian) would like very much, is when old articles would have a good annotation, and the names of articles that linked to this one (trackbacks anyone?).
Print versus web: the headlines discussion
The medium directs the format. Web is different from print. Articles that were originally written for print do not have links in it. They do not have references to related articles (not by default). Many times they have short, witty headlines that would rank terrible, if at all, because they have no keywords in it.
Print content is also limited in the way it is distributed. On the web, it is much easier to distribute snippets, excerpts, and different headline versions throughout a website. Think about the different locations a ‘headline’ can be placed: the title-metatag, <h1>, linktext, and maybe even social media titles. This puts the whole discussion about headlines that are ‘lost in Web translation’ in a more nuanced perspective. Also, on the web, you usually have more space available to write words into headlines. Print is different.
Conclusion… for now
So last week I was just thinking about some of the stuff you have to deal with when doing newspaper SEO, and specifically the content part of it. There is a lot more to it, and I intend to follow-up this article. Let’s conclude with some good stuff you can find elsewhere.
Suggested reading
- News.com article and News.com: web headline magic. Both contain a macro vision article about the way SEO is changing copywriting within newspapers;
- Seobook: discussion about newspaper online business models;
- Slashdot about witty headlines versus SEO headlines: turns out not everyone likes wittily crafted headlines: people WANT ‘clear, concise headlines that actually summarize the story’. Thesame viewpoint is expressed here. Journalists reply that headlines are all that visitors read, so they MUST be clever and witty.
- Newspaper headlines lost in web translation: so how do you re-write headlines for SEO? This article is loaded with examples.
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