Selling out: Would newspapers do it?

02/03/10 posted by Liz Niland

Online newspapers have long complained about the woes of not being compensated by Google News and other information aggregators for their journalistic provisions, but a new debate is building that could potentially see publishers begin to rake in the cash.

Click on any newspaper’s website - SMH, The Australian, The New York Times - and, if you’ve got your Google Toolbar enabled, you’ll note the impressive PageRank (Google determined score of a webpage) held by their homepages. From a search engine optimisation perspective, a simple keyword-based link from a news homepage would be of great benefit to an already well-optimised website.

Online newspapers have long shied away from the selling of SEO-friendly linking space, but SEO’s in the UK, as reported by the Guardian, have “pumped up the volume during an industry event” on the push for such a service. On the surface, this looks like it could be a mutually beneficial agreement for both SEOs and newspapers. Dig a little deeper though and a number of issues arise that could cause concern for both parties.

Link building is an important part of SEO and can be done through a handful of different ways. Ideally, it is a natural process that comes from the creation and sharing of unique, quality content. Sometimes however, particularly for newer or niche websites, this process needs a helping hand until it can begin to function naturally. This helping hand comes in the way of link building, which often involves the “grey hat” practice of link purchasing, ideally from pages that have a higher PageRank. Like news websites.

Given newspapers, in both their traditional and online forms, are great supporters of classifieds and paid advertising, it is not a massive leap to think they could offer this service. The problems, however, come with the nature of link buying compared to traditional advertising. Unlike advertising with its flashing images, bright banners and often distracting pop-up or rollout forms, link buying is far more subtle, needing only a simple text-based hyperlink containing a webpage’s primary keyword, in the footer of the homepage. For the benefits a link on this prime real estate could offer a website, newspapers could charge thousands for even just three months worth of live link time.

While search engines generally overlook such enhanced techniques when done professionally on relevant websites on a smaller scale, multiple purchased links to varied websites on such a highly ranked webpage could certainly raise suspicion, especially if Google are not willing to officially allow this as a green-lighted revenue-making scheme for newspapers. In the unlikely circumstance that this scheme was to go ahead regardless of support from Google, newspapers and the linked websites could face serious consequences, rendering them rankless for years to come. It would most definitely be a scheme that favours the rich and disadvantages websites that are honestly providing high quality services and content.

It is certainly a topic that will receive a lot more debate and discussion going forward as newspapers begin to now understand more about the online landscape within which they now must not only exist, but also attempt to thrive.