SEWoe is me
Mar 12th, 2010 by handolio
I don’t know. Seems I’m still feeling pissy about the polluting effect of SEO on content. While Google News seems to have temporarily extinguished Autobulbs Direct, a host of similar sites are cropping up in its results, blabbering on about how the weather could delay prestige car hire customers (people) or how British commercial vehicle hire users (lorry drivers) are safer than their foreign counterparts.
I’m fascinated by this stuff, because it’s shit, but also because if Google News is going to allow it it drives home a depressing realisation: from day one, Charlie and I could have put all our ‘journalist’ crap aside and just rewritten optimised press releases as news – don’t think nobody wanted us to. We’d have hated ourselves and gained even fewer readers, but clearly they’re not the point.
So I’ve been thinking more about exactly why companies want psews on their websites. Make no mistake that it’s all about the optimised links, but a quick chat with @randipdhesi helped me better understand what’s going on. They’re not getting link equity from Google News, of course, but they are getting a degree of traffic, and there’s always the chance that people linking to the news story will – like I did – forget to add a no follow.
Linking 101
By omitting this, and thus conferring its (limited) authority to another site through a link, Hackbash is suggesting to Google that it rank that site more highly for search terms similar to the anchor text used. By way of an example, I know of a jolly good B&B. At the time of writing, search results for that exact term all relate to a pub in Hampshire. Within a day or two, now I’ve written that, the B&B closer to my heart should rank alongside it.
So that’s part of it, although of course you can’t control the text with which people link to your site*. But third-party sites that link to yours confer a more general sort of authority on it, and by careful management of links within the receiving site this ‘Googlejuice’ can be distributed in a controlled fashion.
By ensuring that any part of the site that attracts inbound links contains only optimised links that point to the site’s own product landing pages, a company can channel some of its incoming link love to its products. This helps them rank more highly when people search in Google for product-related terms. Like prestige car hire, commercial vehicle hire or fucking car lights.
Randip makes the point that a newsfeed is particularly attractive, because there’s no shortage of third-party sites who’ll syndicate, or simply rip off its content. In some cases the links stay intact, resulting in an optimised link to a product page from a third-party: the best of all worlds.
Tamsin’s written on the iCrossing blog about how Google’s useless in a crisis. To an extent that’s unsurprising; something as fast moving and serious as the Chilean earthquake is always going to generate a challenging amount of information and, as Tamsin says, much of this came via sources created specifically for the job. Google’s search algorithm wasn’t designed to reach an instant value judgement, and yet increasingly it needs to.
But news aggregation relates to established and ongoing sources, and as such it’s an area where a search engine has the time to fettle and refine its service. By now, Google News should be shit-hot. It’s tempting to say it’s half-way there.
* Search agencies, including iCrossing, do ask, and some webmasters are happy to oblige.
Pithy and to the point. I’m fed up of the internet being rubbish and boring.
Cheers Tamsin, me too.
The B&B link turned out to be an interesting experiment. I checked the search results after I published and hackbash was ranking within an hour for ‘jolly good B&B’, which isn’t exactly how we pitch the blog.
I’ve checked back a few times to see if the B&B I linked to would begin ranking, and was about to point out to Randip that one of the main principles of SEO and linkbuilding practice didn’t work and thus he and about a third of iCrossing’s staff should probably pick up their coats.
It’s there now. You can take your coat off Randip, but don’t get too cocky.
The thing I really don’t get about Google’s approach is that the humber of news sources is not ‘robots-only’ high. A small team of human bullshit detectors could easily review the relatively limited number.
Given the prominence that Google often gives the news in blended results, you’d think it might be worth the investment for the sake of SERP quality. Google, schmoogle.