A lesson in SEO from Charlie Brooker

Following the surge of comments generated by Charlie Brooker’s Comment is Free article, he’s asking this week what impact search engine optimisation could have on the quality of journalism online.

To take his point to the extreme Brooker gives us a fully SEO-ready article complete with celebrity names, certain pharmaceutical brands and political links (I’d mention them by name but that would start a kind of SEO vicious circle for this post).

As one commenter points out, Brooker’s got it spot on - at the time of writing his article occupies the top five slots when you Google the key SEO terms shown below:

Jokes aside - Telegraph.co.uk’s Shane Richmond has given us some insight into the site’s SEO strategy, would be good to hear what might be going on with the Guardian.

Tags: Charlie Brooker, google, search engine, Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk, The Guardian

Guardian: Charlie Brooker on search engine optimisation

After a surge of comments on his article last week, Charlie Brooker questions whether SEO could negatively impact journalism.

Tags: Charlie Brooker

Innovations in Journalism - MediaGeeks

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. So how about a search engine for the media? Welcome Mediageeks.org.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Howard Owens, I’ve been doing online media for 13 years and am a bit of a geek about it.

When I first started thinking about launching a site like [the journalism social network] WiredJournalists.com, I registered the domain MediaGeeks.org. I wanted to create a social network for media geeks just like me.

When Ryan Sholin and Zac Echola and I started talking about the concept that became WiredJournalists.com, they weren’t so sold on “media geeks,” so I had this domain sitting around … and I had been wanting to play with building niche/vertical search engines with Google. I launched my first vertical search engine for RVClub.com in 1998 (with the help of now defunct WaveShift), so this is a concept of long-standing interest.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Because it allows you to have a search filtered to just media/journalistic topics. Let’s say you’re curious about what media people say about coverage of Paris Hilton … well, a general Google search for ‘Paris Hilton and media’ won’t be fruitful, because of the gazzillion of non-media hits.This search filters out all the non-media sites, so you can get right to the heart of what media publications and media bloggers might be saying about PH and coverage of her.

That’s just an example, but it should point the way to how you can leverage a more filtered search of just media-related sites.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
It probably won’t get any more attention, except for adding more media sites as they came along. Google has upgraded the API for the Business Edition of its search product, but not the free version. I’m not sure I’ll have time to do any fancy programming to improve the search engine should those upgrades become available to the free version.

4) Why are you doing this?
Because I thought it would be useful to me (and it has been, though not as useful a I had hoped because even Google search doesn’t always work as well as it should), so I hoped it would be useful to others. Not many people use it, though - I’m not sure if that’s because it’s a bad idea, or a lack of publicity.

I suppose you could argue in a networked world, if it were a good idea, it would have caught on by now. But it’s free to me, essentially, so right now I see no reason to take it down. Maybe it will catch on yet.

5) What does it cost to use it?
It’s free.

6) How will you make it pay?
I don’t need to make it pay, but I would love it if people started using it and some of those Google ads got clicked on once in a while (all out of legitimate interest in the advertiser’s message, of course), and I got to make a little extra money each month. That would be great, but not required.

There is an aspect, too, of giving back to the community, which isn’t something you hear online journalists talk about much these days, but used to be a big concept of being a Netizen a decade ago or so. So, even while the site hasn’t caught on, it is at some level an attempt to give back for all the goodness I get from the web and the online media community.

Tags: filtered search, google, Howard Owens, media bloggers, media geeks, niche/vertical search engines, online journalists, search engine, search product

Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk

Slick searching: Using Google News to look for stories online that involve a news provider (eg BBC + Johnson), but Google keeps returning the search with BBC as the source? Use two plus symbols to get round it: Johnson ++ BBC. Tipster: Oliver Luft

Got a tip? Submit it here - we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Digg launches recommendation engine

Digg is launching a new recommendation engine – offering a first play with the new technology to a random sample of Digg users to test this week.

The beta device will analyse users past ‘Digging’ activity to uncover other users and content that may be of interest to them.

Digg intends to roll out the technology later on in the week to all users.

“The Recommendation Engine is a cool way to discover new content on Digg. Now that there are more than 16,000 stories submitted to the Upcoming section every day, it’s difficult to sort through everything to find the best content,” Digg founder Kevin Rose wrote on his blog.

“The Recommendation Engine uses your past digging activity to identify what we call Diggers Like You (who you can see on the right hand nav) to suggest stories you might like.”

Tags: Digg, Kevin Rose

Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Do you know what your readers are searching for?

Online publishing: Do you know what people are searching for on your website? Check the logs for the most common search terms and see if what you are writing about matches what users want - you could be surprised. Tipster: Oliver Luft

Got a tip? Submit it here - we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Tags: Journalism.co.uk, Oliver Luft, Online publishing, search terms

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

Tags: blog search, Denmark, Europe, Finland, google, Journalism.co.uk, Madeleine Östlund, mainstream media, Martin Källström, media journalists, media partnerships, Norway, Portugal, San Francisco, search engine, social media, South Africa, Spain, spam free blog search engine, Stockholm, Sweden, target group, The Netherlands, Twingly, visual search engine, web, web docusoap, YouTube

Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta

Boston.com, the website for the Boston Globe, has added MetaCarta’s geotagging technology to improve the localised search on the site.

Content from the site and others that are included by Boston.com’s search will be automatically tagged by MetaCarta allowing users to search by geographical area.

The aim, says a press release from the New York Times Company, is to increase the frequency of users and page traffic.

In March MetaCarta to launched a new website mapping news stories from across the globe, having previously teamed up with Reuters to offer a map of US news stories.

Tags: Boston Globe, geotagging technology, local search, localised search, reuters, the New York Times Company, United States

Getting links with made-up content: clever marketing or unethical publishing?

A story on financial website Money.co.uk of a teenager stealing his dad’s credit card to pay for prostitutes ticked all the right boxes to be a search engine success.

And for those of you who haven’t come across it yet, it is too good to be true.

It’s made up, fictitious and fabricated to generate what the man behind it - Lyndon Antcliff - calls linkbait.

According to a blog post by Antcliff, the piece, which carried no byline and wasn’t on the news wires, attracted 14,000 links, in addition to being picked up by various other news publishers.

As he says in the post he’s not himself debating the ethics of such practice, but will ‘leave that to others who have a lot more time on their hands’, which is where this post steps in.

Yes - sites should optimise headlines for search engines and try to ensure the story keeps up with what the headline promises. But making content up is dangerous for a publisher’s reputation and unethical.

As Antcliff points out, it’s alarming that other media did not check the facts of the article before republishing it and the spread of the story proves he knows what he’s doing when it comes to optimising content.

It’s just a shame the same trial couldn’t have been carried out on a real piece of content.

Despite Antcliff saying he ‘pushed the boundaries of the ridiculous to make it obvious that the story wasn’t true’ it is still available on the website and until recently carried no label of it being hoax.

It now includes the note: “This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously”, which doesn’t help explain things much, just makes the reader wonder why they’re publishing it.

Other media aside, doesn’t running content purely for linkbaiting purposes undermine Money.co.uk’s credibility to a worryingly low level?

Tags: Money.co.uk, search engine, search engine success, search engines

BBC Trust: bbc.co.uk internal search and external linking need ‘major improvements’

The BBC’s internal website search is ‘not seen as very effective’ by users, according to a review of the site released by the BBC Trust today.

The number of visits to bbc.co.uk pages that were the result of referrals from the site’s internal search engine dropped from 24% during the last three months of 2006 to 19% over the same period in 2007.

In contrast, 70% of search engine referrals came from Google.

“The search just throws everything at you, you would have to spend ages just looking through the pages to find what you need,” one respondent to the Trust’s research said.

The Trust was also ‘disappointed’ with the number of click-throughs generated by external links on bbc.co.uk and criticised the Beeb’s relationship with other content-sharing websites:

“We are also not convinced that BBC management’s ambition to be ‘part of’ the web rather than ‘on it’ by embedding BBC content in other sites (such as Youtube) plays any role in acting as a ‘trusted guide’ to the wider web.  Rather, this is mainly a way of marketing BBC content to those who might not otherwise access it.”

The links to other sites form part of the BBC’s role as a ‘trusted guide’ online.

According to the review, there were 6.7 million click-throughs to external sites from bbc.co.uk in July 2007 - 4.7 million of which originated in the UK.

However, the number of click-throughs from sport and news - the most visited areas of the site - have decreased year-on-year since 2006.

BBC management suggested this decline is a result of the BBC site being seen as a ‘destination’ rather than a way to navigate the web. The Trust argued that issues of accessibility and effectiveness were the problem.

The risk of the BBC becoming a ‘dominant gateway service’ is ‘very much alive’ and requires effective external linking to avoid this, the review stated.

As such the Trust has asked BBC management to submit plans on improving linking and other ways to help users navigate beyond the BBC.

Tags: BBC Trust, google, internal search, internal search engine, internal website search, search engine, search engine referrals, United Kingdom, wider web, YouTube