Loading ...If you can’t win, change the rules (or bitch until someone does it for you).
Major media companies are increasingly lobbying Google to elevate their expensive professional content within the search engine’s undifferentiated slush of results.
Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they’re newly upset that Google’s algorithm penalizes paid content.
Waaaaah, we pay a lot for stories that can’t hold people’s attention offline, and those who put together a more complete picture of our online content are beating us out…
Actually, fair enough. You’ve got good original content, why shouldn’t you rank well? The problem is that the ‘paid content’ that they’re talking about isn’t even so much about paid content: It’s about duplicate content. Once ten versions of the same story which have been sold to multiple outlets are out there with little to no physical difference between them, doubt is cast on the value of all versions. There needs to be a least a little uniqueness to each and every cut, or everyone pays the price.
The real kicker, however, is the example that these moguls chose to pull up:
He’d just run a search for Gaza…
Gaza? Seriously? You think a news organization deserves to rank for a proper noun, let alone a country (or in this case a “country” that’s a coup-formed theocracy versus the whole of a supposed Palestine)? No, I think not. Of course Wikipedia is going to rank well for this. Of course ‘outdated’ stories from the BBC, a media organization may I add, that were probably linked to from a wide of sources over a long span of time are going to rank better.
In fact, I give you two first-page results from news sources for ‘Gaza’ that show why they should be there:
In fact, The Guardian ranks #2 for this term that, when one thinks of a search for Gaza the same way you might think of a search for Luxembourg, they should not by any right be ranking for. You know how? Because they built their content smartly. They’ve organized it so that they have an authoritative section of their site on the topic. Combined with the fact that as a news outlet they’re a prime target for links from blogs and other secondary sources wishing to spread the news or comment on it, they’re set up for success.
As much as I roll my eyes at the concept of the Guardian as a whole, these crazy, tree hugging, granola crunching brits have a good thing going on.
And they’re not the only ones – the Chicago Trib is front page with their version of the same concept!
The asshats in the above story are not upset that they’re not ranking. They’re upset because the rankings and the high-level coverage aren’t being handed to them on a silver platter, like most of the media moguls have come to expect when it comes to advertising dollars and viewers / listeners / circulation until the arrival of the new, online world. Well, sorry kiddos.
Everyone else has to take the time to build a good website and structure, and so do you. It’s not impossible, it just means doing things differently to match the medium…oh God, look who I’m trying to tell this to, the exact folks for whom evolution is a feature story and not a corporate concept….
As the late, great Heath Ledger once said: Welcome to the new world. God save you, if it be right that he do so.
I'm kind of a cross between Led Zepplin and these guys:
- Wolfram Alpha = Wikipedia killer?
- Yahoo and MSN merge search – it’s official
- TV Shows Leveraging the Web to Extend Jokes
Tags: fail · Google · Google sucks · political · search engine news · SEO News · traditional media Share on Twitter
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