The BitWorm SEO Blog

Recently there has been a very interesting “conversation” about the role of Google and the traditional news media. I have a slightly different take, and seemingly like everyone else, a suggested solution.

The AP has started this round by saying (and doing) some very stupid things, like sending a cease and desist order to an AP affiliate which embedded a YouTube video that the AP themselves posted on YouTube. [AP Seems Shocked to Discover Its Own YouTube Channel]

Crazy stuff.

Nick Carr posted Google in the Middle, a piece arguing that Google is a ever stronger middle man holding the traditional media hostage. A drastic reduction in supply is his proposed solution…intentional or not.

Mathew Ingram quickly shot back about Why Nick Carr is wrong on Google as a middleman for news. I’m not 100% clear on his point, but “add value” may be able to sum it up.

As far as I’m concerned, if your headline and lede paragraph are the sum total of the value you are providing for readers, then you deserve to lose your business to Google.

As Nick very nicely illustrates, Google news has a huge amount of potential news sources…using my own example:

Is publishing an article about the same story that literally 12,852 other media sources are writing about (ON THE SAME DAY!) a good business model?

I agree that over supply is the problem. But the problem is not too many news outlets, or too many journalists. The problem is too many people writing about the same crap at the same time. In this case, does the world really need 13 thousand articles on April 13th 2009 saying this ship captain is safe? We would do just fine with one thousand stories, with the other 12k news outlets LINKING to these thousand stories.

Google News is The Digital Equivilant of the Retail Newstand

In this case, Google is nothing more than a virtual newstand. The online version of traditional newstand retail distribution. Only difference is location no longer matters. Your “subscribers” come to you directly, and everyone else may give you a chance if on the virtual newstand, you catch their attention.

If on a physical newstand, you could see, side by side, 13k publications all pitching the same lead story, the industry problems would be obvious.

We need more journalists and news outlets focused on creating:

• Unique
• High Quality
• Link Worthy
• Content

We need more news outlets focused on building an audience in a world without regional distribution limits.

Add value. Create Unique content.

For this specific story about the ship captain, the New York Times got my attention. Why? They sent me an (opt-in) email when the story broke. An hour later, the story still was still not on top of Google News.

Create Unique Content

A couple weeks back, my local paper ran a story about the extra money going into people’s paychecks as the result of the Stimulus Bill. Boring story I would never have read.

The paper took a different, unique, high quality, link worth angle. They made a video of what sort of junk you could buy at the local flea market for the $7 the average person would see in their paycheck.

Funny piece, I watched the whole video, read the whole article, wrote a comment, and looked forward to the next similar piece.

They added value and created unique, high quality, link worth content. This may not draw many new visitors, but for the existing audience, it gives me a reason to keep coming back to them for news.

Content like this is what will save the members of the industry that “get it” before it’s too late.

The whole industry needs to take a step back and think about the content they produce. The participants that survive will provide uniqie, high quality, link worthy content. The rest will fall to those that do.

Google’s chrome isn’t a direct attack on Microsoft, unlike what the general consensus of many news agencies and blogs seem to be reporting. 

At least, it isn’t any more of an attack than Ford’s Model T was an direct attack against buggy whip manufacturers.  Ford didn’t set out to hurt the buggy whip companies, but rather to make a car everyone could afford.

Might Microsoft be hurt?  Probably.  However, any pain would be collateral damage due to lack of their own proactive action.  Words mean things.  “Attack” is a word that implies intent.  I don’t think that’s present here, or at least not as a primary driving factor.

Let’s look at the current day reality of the browser market and Google apps.

Google makes advanced web applications that push the limits of the current browser technology, just like how Microsoft’s Windows OS pushed the limits of Intel’s hardware with each release.  Moore’s law is a great thing for Microsoft.  The hardware keeps get better by orders of magnitude.

Here’s the rub – Google has pushed the limits of the current generation of web browsers, while the browser technology has stood still.  Yes, FireFox 3 is an improvement, as is the IE8 beta, but they’re both merely a step in the right direction, not the leap that is needed…and Google’s apps still don’t have any head-room.

Google needs drastic improvements in certain features to push their overall apps and technologies forward.  They’ve been waiting a while, and the market hasn’t responded, so they’ve decided to take matters into their own hands. 

The browser being Open Source is evidence of this.  They don’t really want to “own” this thing, but they know they need it badly enough to make it themselves.

To Microsoft, this may look like an attack.  From my view of the current browser market, it’s a company that is reliant on a commodity product deciding the commodity quality is not acceptable, and taking action in the most direct way possible.

It’s been said that Google takes over 100 different considerations into account when figuring out where to return your page in a search result. Even though that sounds like a lot, all those 100+ factors can be boiled down into two core concepts. To rank well, you need to maximize both.

Ranking = Strength + Relevance

Page Strength

I know a lot of SEO’s love to say PageRank is dead. I disagree, and see evidence of it every day. Sure, PageRank is certainly not as important as it used to be, but it’s certainly not dead.

PageRank is a measure of how important a page is on the Internet as a whole. Every page that links to your is essentially counted as a vote of confidence for the page. Links from important pages like the New York Times count more than links from lesser pages like your brother’s personal blog about his dog. To over-simplify things greatly, Google’s PageRank score is a sum of the value of all those votes in comparison to all the other pages on the web.

There are other factors adding to a page’s strength as well. Such as:

• Is the page new?
• Has the page and/or domain been around for many years?
• Is the domain registered for a long term between renewals, like 5 years?
• Is the domain or page penalized for not following the webmaster guidelines?
• Is the domain selling links?
• Is the page located in Wikipedia? (OK - maybe not that one)

I know I’m missing some factors, but you get the general idea about what might play into strength.

What’s clear though, is that your page is never going to rank well on strength alone.

Ranking well needs one additional key factor…relevance.

Query Relevance

If strength was all that was required, a site like www.google.com would rank #1 for all queries…it’s a PageRank ten out of ten. That obviously would not make sense.

Relevance is a measure of how related a page is to what the user has search for. Your brother Joe’s blog about his dog, even though not a strong site, may very well be the most relevant destination for people searching for “joe dog blog”.

Relevance factors include:

On-Page:

• Query Terms in the title?
• Query Terms in header tags?
• Query Terms in body text?
• Query Terms in outgoing link text?

Off-Page:

• Query Terms in incoming link text?
• Query Terms in “on page factors” of the pages linking in?

It’s possible for a page to rank well based on a strong relevance while having a low pagerank, which is why some people say pagerank is dead. (That doesn’t mean PageRank is dead, it just means there are other factors than can overcome a low pagerank.)

Burn the Candle on Both Ends

Strength and Relevancy are simple high level concepts that can be easily explained and understood by both technical and non-technical users alike.

Some tasks, like link building, will have an impact on both.

For a strong ranking, your strategy should be to maximize both strength and relevancy. Don’t give one the blind eye.

Matt Cutts opened up a whole new world of possibilities when he told Rand from SEOmoz that it’s acceptable for a site owner to use nofollow on internal links to control the flow of PageRank within a site.

There’s a whole can of worms that has been opened up by internal use of nofollow being considered white hat. Matt muddied the waters a bit in this comment, but still indicates internal use of nofollow is a white hat tool webmasters can use by saying “It’s available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.”

So far the best information I’ve seen about this is the Third Level Push (modified Siloing) For Deeper Index Penetration. That’s an excellent post, tool, and process, but it’s not the whole story. It’s also a little hard to get your head around.

Update: Social & Search also just posted another excellent article on the topic of pagerank sculpting.

On most sites, especially smaller ones, I don’t think PageRank sculpting is generally required. It may actually cause more harm that good.  On larger sites, especially where SEO is not a primary concern, PageRank Sculpting could make a huge difference in how linkjuice flows through your site.

Here’s one example.

PR Sculpting using internal nofollow tags may be helpful for a site with extensive multiple layers of site navigation as part of the template for a site. (Think your entire sitemap on every page.)

The one example I’m thinking of right now has over 80 links in css based drops downs in the top navigation bar. Granted, there are over a thousand pages on the site, so it still only links to a small fraction of the overall pages.

If your site only has a handful of site wide navigation links, link sculpting isn’t for you. However, if you have multiple levels of CSS based dropdowns leading deep into your site, including to areas not very valuable in terms of search traffic, you may be a good candidate for internal use of nofollow.

Having a large quantity of deep links from every page on your site can only help, right? Well, maybe not. By linking to a large number of pages from your site template, you end up spreading your link juice very thin over your entire site, like peanut butter on bread. While that may be what’s best, sometimes that does more harm than good.

Instead of spreading your link juice thinly over a large portion of your site, you may be better off strategically directing a larger portion of your PageRank to certain pages by properly implementing nofollow on some internal links. We’ll get into that in future posts.

Is your site navigation like peanut butter on bread? Is it helping or hurting the PageRank flow within your sites?  This is like a sharp knife…sometimes it’s the best tool for the job, but if you’re not careful…it could hurt or kill your site.