Archive for the ‘News’ Category
BBC News – Google to limit free news access
December 2nd, 2009 | 
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This is a very interesting development and raises a ton of questions. The first thing that comes to mind as an SEO practitioner is that newspapers do very well in the search engine results pages. This is clearly due to the massive authority they have because of the mountains of unique content they produce and the number of other sites linking to them (among other factors).
If newspapers are going to restrict free access to their news then I’d expect that Google would severely restrict their access to page one listings for keywords that are relevant to any newspaper articles that have to be paid for. Most users expect free news and there is plenty of it around, so if Google clutters up page one with subscriptions pages any search engine that bucks this approach will pinch their share.
The truth is that if I have paid for a subscription I’d have my RSS feed reader pull in the news or have a bookmark on my toolbar, so if I was actually searching for news I’d want to be served up free options not subscription pages.
If Google does penalize news sites for offering up subscription pages (which it should as a subscription page isn’t relevant to a keyword search for ‘Lancashire hot cakes murder trial’), then this could open the field for smaller free news services to get some extra traffic.
It seems to me that the news providers are getting around this potential for a penalty by allowing visitors to view the first few articles free, but for any heavy news searcher it won’t be long before their search results are bunged up with subscription pages.
I understand that print media has taken a big hit but they have enough money and resources to come up with creative advertising related models. Trying to stem the flow of news will just open the field for smaller web sites and word of mouth reporting via social media, which if you think about it could be better than some of the garbage that comes out of the major press!
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Posterous Initial Thoughts
This service seemed so simple so I had try it out. http://posterous.com/
In short you can post to your all of your content distribution points via your email or via a posterous bookmarklet in your browser. I signed up and first port as usual is the profile page where I edited my user data by adding the same old greyscale photo I’ve been using sometime now and then changed the theme to match my main sites. I also made sure at sign up that the posterous URL contains my company name which unsurprisingly includes my keywords. To get the system set up for content sharing you have to go through the usual steps of handing over your passwords which I do with one eye on the future when the service goes down and my passwords get scattered across cyberspace – or maybe I’m paranoid. But once you’ve got over that you can start your messing about. Getting down to business I decided to use the bookmarklet first and posted directly to my posterous site. Here are the results http://brooksdigitalmarketing.posterous.com/ . Personally I think it looks ok but I’m not particularly bothered since it is more a stepping stone to my main site. When you post via email which I used for this post you can specify whether or not you want to post to all usingthe post@ syntax or you can use a selection of other; for this I used blog@. I would recommend reading the FAQ sections as there is a lot you can do with this but in truth I’m a novice so can’t offer any more wisdom. What I do know is that the posterous pages get cached and the links are not nofollowed so there seems to be some link love available. Give it a spin and see what you think.