Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| The Rise of Page View Journalism Posted: 29 Sep 2010 07:23 AM PDT
In the early days of newspapers, success and advertising was measured by total circulation. The ability to measure how many people were reading just the business section, lifestyle section, or sports section didn’t exist. As more consumers switch their news reading habits to online consumption, our ability to track which section and pages are being read has improved. However, this enhanced tracking has a dark side: the rise of page view journalism. Simply put, page view journalism is the deliberate creation of stories that are designed to increase page views. It often results in an increase of low quality, high volume reporting and off topic stories. people will have to reach the conclusion that there is some quality news that is worth paying to have access to … While page view journalism is often attributed as the primary cause of demand media style content, the fact is it’s so pervasive now that it has almost become the norm. Look at the homepage of Techmeme on any given day and you’ll see an increasingly large number of websites trying to siphon off some of that traffic by “reblogging ” the top stories of the day, adding little or no value to the discussion. While rebloggers are at the lower end of the food chain, page view journalism also occurs at the top. Techcrunch, for example, covers with voluminous detail almost every story that is even slightly connected to twitter. It wouldn’t surprise me if MG Siegler did an expose on how Mary in the AP department at Twitter killed the staple market by switching to paper clips. Don’t laugh…it’s not that far fetched. Want an example of how to lose your focus? Check out Mashable, a site that regularly stretches to cover things like Tiger Woods and Fashion Week in an effort to bolster page views. The king of page view media is the Huffington Post, which reblogs, over-covers everything, and has gone off-topic so much it no longer has a main topic. if you aren’t paying something, then you aren’t a customer: you are the product that’s being sold… So what’s the cause of this page view journalism? It’s economics. The fact is that an online customer is worth only a quarter of what a print customer is worth. For newspapers, those economics simply don’t make a profit; for virtual newsrooms or lean new media ventures like Techcrunch, they do. As we take advantage of the cognitive surplus and the lower cost barrier to entry, the news shifts from being a scarce commodity to something we have an abundance of. The fact that our attention spans are changing and short, reblog-style posts are preferred by many, as opposed to in-depth 3-4 pages articles in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal also plays a role. Simply put, a newspaper has a hard time justifying a reporter’s salary to cover something in depth when revenues are decreasing and advertisers are paying less. Publishers like Gawker who don’t have to deal with real world expenses like union wages, delivery costs, health care benefits, and pension plans have lower operating costs. Greed, however, is a universal concept. Even if you operate in a business with lower operating expenses, publishers still want to extract the most profit so, instead of overpriced classified ads, they go after high search volume terms to drive up CPM revenue. As long as there’s a way to make money off of impressions, this trend will continue. As long as there’s a glut of news, the quality will spiral downward. As long as the quality continues to drop, so will the ad revenue … It is a vicious, self-fulfilling prophecy. The only way out is for publishers at the fore to go the route of publications like All Things D to put out quality news. Then people will have to reach the conclusion that there is some quality news that is worth paying to have access to. People may continue to want “free” news, but it’s like the saying goes “if you aren’t paying something, then you aren’t a customer: you are the product that’s being sold.” This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.  Related posts:
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| How to Do A Content Audit of Your Website Posted: 28 Sep 2010 08:08 AM PDT
If you have a website that’s been around for a few years and you’re looking for ways to make some improvements, one of the tactics I recommend is doing a content audit. When you do a content audit you have a few goals in mind:
Get the Datayour inbound link equity can only support a certain number of pages … The first thing you need to do is to get an understanding of where your website currently stands. You’ll need a list of the pages of your website, the number of inbound links, and amount of visitors your page receives. If you are using Webmaster central, you can export a spreadsheet of all the pages with the number of links. The next thing you have to do is add a column for page views. I like to use a timeframe between a year and year and half. Depending on the number of pages your website has, it could take a while to get all this data. This is the perfect task for an intern or outsourced labor from a place like ODesk. I recently performed this task on a website that has 1800 URL’s. It cost me $75, and I had the data back in just over 24 hours. Identify the Low Performing PagesThe two primary factors I like to look at are how many links does a post/page have and how much traffic did it generate in the past 18 months. Any page that generated less than 100 page views is a candidate for deletion. Additionally, any page that generated less than 25 links is also a candidate for deletion. Delete or RewriteAt this point you’ll have a list of pages that generated minimal links and/or traffic and are therefore candidates for deletion or revision. This is where it requires some decision making. If a page generated a lot of links but not much traffic, I’m probably going to keep it intact. The same is true for pages with high traffic but a low number of links. When pages are low on links and low on traffic, you have to use your judgment. In some cases, the post was a throwaway post–important at the time but not important now. Those are easy to justify deleting. In other cases, you’ll want to keep them. At the very least I would suggest looking at the pages to see if you can improve them. In some cases the information is outdated and needs a complete rewrite. In other cases it just requires a little updating. One of the tools I’ve found to be helpful is Scribe SEO (see my Scribe SEO review). It gives you a quick overview and can sometimes make a few quick easy suggestions to improve a page. A third option is creating a living URL style page. When you rewrite or revise pages you really want to look for ways to maximize your internal anchor text and linkage whenever possible. Why Should You Delete Old Posts or PagesWhen I talk about this practice, a lot of people wonder why would you bother deleting pages. After all, there’s no harm in keeping them around and you’ve already spent the time and energy having them created. For the answer, we need to look at the concept of link equity. Each website only has a certain amount of links, trust, and authority coming into it … this concept is called link equity. That link equity can only support a certain number of pages. For example a brand new website with few links won’t be able to have thousands of pages in the index: the search engines simply don’t have enough signals of quality to support anything more than superficial crawling. Additionally IMHO ever since the “mayday update” the days of “infinite websites” have come to an end. When I mention deleting old posts, sometimes bloggers look like they are going to break down in tears, as if I asked them to abandon a puppy with no food or water outside in a freezing snowstorm. If you’re the type of person who has a deep emotional attachment to your posts, you aren’t running a business website. You are creating Aunt Millie’s Christmas Letter. Backups and RedirectionsBefore you delete a single post make sure you have multiple backups of all of your posts. You want the ability to bring your posts back if you delete one by accident. If you use WordPress, you can trash a page/post and it’s deleted from public view, but it lingers in limbo for 30 days and is easy to bring back. If any of the pages have more than a handful of links you should set up a redirection. Try to redirect to a similar-themed post or revised post if possible. If not then the homepage, the sitemap, or archives page. A controversial step is to redirect to a different commercial page or to create a link hub somewhere else. Let your conscience be your guide to your approach. Lastly, you want to trap for 404 errors and redirect anything you might have missed. Again, if you use WordPress, the redirection plugin takes care of the 404 and redirections in one spot. What are the takeaways in this post:
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review. Related posts:
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