An Industry Fighting for Survival
You don’t need a vested interest in the fate of newspapers to be privy to the increasing number of stories about the industry’s struggle in the digital age. ‘Citizen journalism’ and blogging has led to wide cuts in staffing, journalists still employed need to be paid decent – or at least competitive – wages, and newspapers are still extremely dependent on advertisers who are taking their money elsewhere, primarily to the web to improve their SEO rankings and online advertising presence.
Newspapers, as a result, are frantically searching for a practical model to reinvigorate the business. One highly publicized method is to charge for online content. Yet another method has been discussed quietly for months. It is only recently that the chatter has reached the public domain through YouTube videos and in-the-know blogs.
This proposed model has newspapers identifying third party websites with little to no traffic and selling links to them in their editorial content. This would enable papers to regain some of their advertising revenue while tapping into one of the major reasons they lost the it in the first place: advertisers taking a greater interest in page rankings and SEO.
How Linking Works
Around 30% of Google’s algorithm for pages rankings are calculated through links to the website. Google assumes that linking implies recommendation, thus each link suggests the website’s relevance and quality. Links from particular websites count more than others. For example, newspapers have a high page rank with Google. If they link to a page, their benefits are, to some extent, passed on to the linked page.
However, if links are randomly generated or irrelevant to the content, Google’s search results become meaningless, providing results based on quantity of links rather than quality or a real online presence being built. This, of course, is extremely damaging to Google.
Dangerous Consequences
While link selling has gone on for years (even big hitters such as Yahoo and WordPress have been caught doing it), recent public chatter about it has been hushed. Even YouTube videos from the recent Silicon Beach Training SEO event where the discussion originated were made private within a couple of hours. And it’s easy to see why; this topic is not only contentious, it’s downright dangerous for newspapers.
For starters, the topic focuses attention on the difference between ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ search engine optimization. In true fairytale stereotype, white denotes ‘good’ or above board techniques to boost page rankings, while black suggests more underhand – and less-publicized – methods. Needless to say, purchasing editorial links is considered ‘black hat’. Many companies employ both white and black hat methods to improve rankings, and, because so many organisations are in glass houses on this one, no one wants to throw accusatory stones or even mention this tension between these approaches.You can find out more about white vs. black hat methods here.
This approach also blurs the line between editorial and advertising – something which can significantly affect the integrity of any news organization.
More important than putting a few noses out of joint, however, is the danger newspapers face in employing this method of generating revenue. When Google finds out about the link selling, as they surely will, they could take two courses of action. The first is to change their algorithms to give less clout to outbound links on newspaper sites. In this case, newspapers will simply lose out on this source of revenue when advertisers no longer invest. The second possibility is far more dangerous. Google could choose to reduce the page rank of the newspapers themselves, thus negatively affecting their ad revenue even more as the sites become less attractive to buyers. Both The Irish Times and The Economist faced this consequence when they sold links in previous months.
There’s no doubt that the next few years could make or break the newspaper industry. For now, the discussion is still relatively hush-hush. Newspapers would do well to keep it that way. In the meantime, the rest of us would do well to keep on top of these industry developments to ensure we can achieve the best results in SEO within industry-accepted parameters.