The New York Times flexes its SEO Muscle
We knew it was coming, and we knew the New York Times was “getting” SEO. And it didn’t take long. The King of Content is now dominating the Google SERPs across a wide swath of the keyword space, via the re-published, re-purposed, New York Times Archives. Each “article” is re-purposed on a clean, CSS-driven text page, clearly dated TODAY and not-co-clearly labeled as “originally published” back in 1997, 1998, or whatever all the way back to 1981. Of course cross-referenced, categorized, sub-categorized, ad-infinitum.
You can check for yourself on your own “current events” topics of interest. Look for query.nytimes.com (search results) and topics.nytimes.com (archives) showing up in the #1 spot for search phrases, as if the re-published content was “fresh news”. Via Google referral, many of them are full articles. Via the New York Times archive search pages, my tests mostly returned pay-per-article results sets. Yes, there are ads on the pages.
Clearly if Google is going to rank “newly published” results as most relevant in a SERP, there is a nice big fat incentive to “re-publish” such archives fairly often. I wonder what the plan is, and what the monetization looks like?
[Update: Within a few hours of this post Google updated the SERPs.The result set mentioned in the comments was apparently “hand edited” - the NYT no longer ranks for that result. I just did my own re-check of one of my queries and it’s still query.nyt as #1 and topics at number 4. I suppose if it were important to me, I would list them here and get the NYT removed. Isn’t that good to know? (that was “sarcasm“, by the way)]
Topical Tags:SEO
May 7th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Smoke em if you got em. :D
May 7th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
John, this is a good post. Damn good. It just gave me one of those “ah ha” moments. Keep up the good work. Cheers Simon
May 7th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Awwww…you noticed!
#2 for ’sex’ is my personal favorite..I mean…well, not like that!
May 8th, 2007 at 11:06 am
“Clearly if Google is going to rank “newly published” results as most relevant in a SERP, there is a nice big fat incentive to “re-publish” such archives fairly often”
We have a website with 150 archived, keyword rich articles.(800-1000 words each) We have had plan to go back and re-optimize these articles, for improved internal linking, and keyword optimization.
How would we go about doing something similar to what NY Times has done?
Thank you for your feedback.
Michael
May 8th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
If any organization has quality content that deserves a high ranking in Google, it is certainly the New York Times.
Who is it that deserves a higher page rank that you feel is being unfairly squashed?
May 8th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Shoot, and it only took them a decade to figure it out! HAH!!!
May 8th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Geesh I never anticipated all the “spammer” stuff on the web today. Pitiful. Bow your heads in homage to Matthew and his partners over there propping up the NYTimes. It’s SEO and it works and they did it and they know it, I know it, and you know it.
Self-check for all who call themselves “SEOs”: if your reaction to this was to cry “spammer” you should re-consider your career choices.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:25 am
what “current events” search terms did you use to test? i tried three different queries ranging in time from 2007, 2006 and late ’90s and couldn’t match your findings. nyt never ranked number one and in the one query where it showed up 7th, the link went to a page with the first-published date clearly marked.
it would be interesting if in the dawning age of corporate integrity and ongoing media scrutiny, if nyt said, screw it, we’re going to cheat.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I suppose The New York Times has to do something given that hard copy newspaper readership continues to drop. Still, it makes you wonder: will we see stories about World War II listed as TODAY?
May 10th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Regarding your website, the information is great but it’s Hard to read your blog! I have fairly good eyesight, but I wonder how others with less than 20/20 vision read your faded grey small font. Have you had anyone else comment on that?…
January 5th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
[…] I admired the New York Times for their SEO efforts in the past, and even followed up when some SEO people whined about unfair competition from the New York Times SEO efforts. But now The new York Times is demonstrating the greedy behavior that some of those SEO whiners feared. It’s not just The Times, but many other newspapers, magazines, and private websites getting to be Greedy Bastards these days. […]