Mirror Group Newspapers has appointed search engine optimisation firm Mediarun to improve the search rankings of its shopping website.
Netimperative: Mirror Group selects SEO firm for shopping site
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NYTimes.com: Google’s Knol could compete with online content publishers
Google’s recently launched online encyclopedia Knol is causing concern among other online publishers, who fear the company’s business as a search engine could come into conflict with its new ‘content publishing’ venture. Google maintains that it is not creating content – posts to Knol are signed and edited by individual users – but acting as a ‘conduit’ on the web.
Guardian was wrong to buy Madeleine McCann keywords on Google
The Guardian has admitted it mistakenly bought the keywords Madeleine McCann from Google.
By wrongly purchasing the keywords a link to the paper’s coverage of Madeleine’s disappearance appeared in a column of sponsored results when a search for her name was made on Google.
The newspaper has now taken down the link and has reviewed the list of keywords it owns, Marc Sands, marketing director for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.
The paper’s purchase of the words Madeleine McCann was criticised by Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, on his personal blog, who said the practice showed the paper was ‘desperate’ to hold onto its position as the UK’s most popular newspaper website according to the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) traffic figures.
“The purchase of terms is a way of getting your stories, at a cost, in front of people. It’s absolutely what everyone does all the time,” said Sands.
[advert]A search for the terms shows the Mirror currently owns the keywords McCanns cleared, while a Google search for other keywords, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, show the the Sun and Times have also purchased phrases from Google.
“It is a way of getting it [news] distributed to people who have expressed an interest in that subject,” he added.
“The issue with the Madeleine McCann keywords is an interesting one. It’s like advertising, but not really: the only reason you and I search for a term is because we are interested in that term.”
The practice had been criticised in the blog post, he said, because of the Guardian’s previous stance on the coverage of the McCann story.
“The Guardian in the past has been very critical of the coverage of Madeleine McCann, saying it has been salacious and misleading. What the person in the blog post is saying is that Madeleine McCann is not to be treated in this way, so what on earth are they doing buying keywords?”
The issue led the paper to review its list of current keywords to assess ‘what news is okay to do it with and what isn’t’, he said.
The Guardian buys thousands of Google keywords relating to current news stories every week, he added. It currently owns the keywords ‘stamp duty’, ‘university league tables’ and ‘post office closures’.
“Madeleine McCann slipped through the net. You don’t approve all these [keyword purchases] every day. We would have had to say to the company that buys the keywords for us: never buy the keywords for Madeleine McCann,” he said.
Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation of newspaper websites is a ‘new area’ for publishers, added Sands.
“Everyone is working their way through and trying to remain true exactly to the principles of what they’re doing, but also to ensure that they’re getting read.”
Brand Republic: Bauer appoints Marco Nadotti to lead video drive
The magazine publisher has appointed Nadotti to the newly-created role of head of video acquisition and syndication.
Nadotti, who previously worked for video search engine Blinkx, will take up his new role on August 1.
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.
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. The best way to win online scratch cards is to use the right strategy. There are many ways to win the online scratch cards but the best and the most effective way to win the online scratch cards is to use the strategy.
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. One of the best ways to go viral on tiktok is to buy tiktok followers it is fast and secure and will help you boost your tiktok
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.
links for 2008-07-16
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Companies such as McDonald’s and Nestle are using mobile and social networks to target junk food ads at youngsters – avoiding a marketing pledge on such advertising.
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Dave Lee suggested a blogging circle of young/new journalists. Journalism.co.uk is looking to host. Suggestions please.
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The Gazette is the latest Trinity Mirror title to relaunch with a network of local news sites incorporating local bloggers.
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Hitwise figures suggest the search engine accounted for 69.17 per cent of searches in the US in June.
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.
Pluck adds new features to social media technology
Social media firm Pluck has developed a new version of its SiteLife platform – the technology currently employed by Hearst Digital and USA Today to ramp up interactive features for users.
According to a press release, the new version (3.3) offers improved search engine optimisation to make content such as comments on news articles and forums more open to search engines.
It also gives more options for publishers when managing online communities.
Pluck’s technology, which handles user comments, ratings, recommendations, image and video sharing, forums, blogs and creates social network-style profiles for users, was recently implemented by the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.