Guardian denounces SEO, loses market leadership to Telegraph due to SEO
Recently Ciaran Norris wrote a thorough piece on how the Guardian basically denounces SEO as scams and fails to grasp the whole concept of it, while facing the Google monopoly with all it’s ramifications. I took a closer look just to discover what the problem with search engine optimisation and the Guardian is: According to an article published at their own website the Guardian is not the leading UK online newspaper anymore. The Telegraph has outpaced them due to “hard technical work, SEO and increasing editorial content by as much as 50%”. As we know in the SEO industry content is still king and combined with proper SEO it can make a difference. So no wonder that the Telegraph managed to increase it’s traffic by 153.4%.
“To me it shows that some people high up in the publishing hierarchy are still stuck in the past, have a superficial expertise if at all in online publishing and blame a whole industry for their own failure.”
The folks at the Guardian better face reality and hire a solid SEO company. Newspapers are not bought solely on newstands anymore they are found via Google and read online for years now. If the Guardian is too slow to adapt they must face the responsibility themselves and stop badmouthing the SEO industry for their own lack of understanding of the new media environment.
It seems that most other established UK newspapers by now have grasped the concept of SEO with the exception of the Guardian. I already cited the The Times article predicting a huge SEO boom in the near future. The Independent has covered SEO only in a single a paragraph last year but the article was a sound one. Indeed The Guardian itself published a primer on SEO, as Ciaran correctly notices, and it was not only about scams. So it seems that it’s not The Guardian as whole but just an incompetent individual.
It’s a strange coincidence though that the publication of the outstanding SEO results of The Telegraph is followed by the denouncement of “SEO scams” by the Guardian a few days later.
Thanks for the link guys.
To be fair, I think now that I may have been a tad harsh (but only a tad). One of The Guardian journos came & left a comment on my site, whilst another did the same on a post of a similar nature. Both said that they realised that SEO wasn’t about scams, just the bad stuff - so I guess that they should be picked up on not explaining things properly to readers, rather than not understanding SEO.
The other reason I say this is that just a couple of days later they invited Danny Sullivan in to speak at an internal seminar (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/future_of_journalism_chasing_r.html). He hammered home the importance of SEO and it certainly seems like it’s something they may be getting to grips with.
It’s interesting that you say they should hire a good SEO firm as an anonymous commenter on my post claimed to work for the company doing their SEO. Whoever that person is, if they’re telling the truth they still have an education job to do (often part of an agency’s role). The answer is, of course, obvious - they should hire my agency!
Comment by Ciaran — June 18, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
Your point about education is very valid. It often becomes the responsibility of agencies to educate clients. It has often been my experience that they dont want to be educated though.
My second point is that even if they did genuinely want to be educated or learn more about the subject where do they go? to a free internet marketing seminar!! these are just scantily covered sales pitches from the local SEO company. What actually nees to happen is organisations such as CBI chamber of commerce, FSB etc should sponsor events and training for senior managers and business owners. This should be a government funded initiative or business organisation objective.
Comment by Gary H — June 18, 2008 @ 11:30 pm
At our agency, we hear the old school attitudes all the time. It never ceases to amaze me that traditional and established businesses so often just don’t seem to get it. All the research now points to the power of SEO and as we know when really applied properly the results can be very, very good.
Most people these days are using Google and in some cases the other Search Engines (alright there is a small percentage of people who don’t use Google) to find products, services, advice, information and news but the genuine uptake for SEO in the corporate sector is still slow.
With regards to the educational side I fully agree. Even if the SEO/SEM is outsourced it always works better when the client has some knowledge of what’s required, what’s best practice, timelines and that sort of thing.
I’ve been speaking at and running a number of courses with organisations like E-Consultancy and The Chartered Institute of Marketing and there does seem to be a rapidly growing interest in SEO.
Many sectors now are hugely competitive eg travel, financial services, electronics but many are still wide open.
The larger newspaper brands have a huge advantage in that they can target the ‘long tail’ due to the amount of content they’re creating.
The Daily Telegraph have done a superb job in this. They understand the whole process of the user journey from search through to SERP through to landing pages and then engagement. They understand and are actively working with SEO, know what’s needed and are doing it very, very well. That’s why they’ve moved ahead and all power to them. Very well done is what I say!
Comment by Search Engine Marketing Guy — June 20, 2008 @ 12:08 pm
If, as you assume, Guardian is so anti SEO, why did they run a explainer piece on it recently http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/09/searchengines.internet
..and why are they the most indexed UK paper? 4.1million pages in Google for guardian
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox&rls=FlockInc.%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=0oK&q=site%3Aguardian.co.uk&btnG=Search
2.6 million for telegraph
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox&rls=FlockInc.%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=i9z&q=site%3Atelegraph.co.uk&btnG=Search
That isn’t by accident - Guardian has been embracing SEO for years.
Comment by Mark — June 20, 2008 @ 12:08 pm
Mark - if you read my post which the guys kindly linked to, you’ll see that I actually pick up on exactly that. The site is obviously (at least partially) optimised and Jemima wrote a piece recently explaining SEO.
What I took exception to was the way that SEOs seemed to be labelled by a couple of the journalists as scammers; to be fair, both of those journalists have now commented on my post or elsewhere that this was not their intent.
Cheers,
Ciarán
PS - Your point about the number of pages indexed is of course meaningless unless you know how many pages each site actually has live. What if The Guardian actually has 10 million pages live and The Telegraph 2.6 million - which is the better at SEO then?
Comment by Ciaran — June 23, 2008 @ 5:33 pm
Right..content does matter alot…no matter how well you optimize your website people get to know in less than 2 minutes if the website is worth sticking to..SEO should be taken and performed as an enhancer of websites and not just to bring it on search engines’ 1st page.
Comment by Internet Strategy — July 3, 2008 @ 6:44 am
A good article and interesting follow up comments, I would like to speak from a Telegraph perspective.
About a year ago we started on the journey of focusing on SEO both technically and editorially and have successfully grown our traffic from 7m UU per month to 18.6m, making us more competitive in our market in terms of Global UU traffic. The majority of this work has been carried out by our in house editorial and technical teams working together with a common goal and clear guidelines.
SEO for publishers is both competitive and complicated and we are pleased but not complacent with our current progress. We fully appreciate that this is a very dynamic market place and we constantly strive to improve our SEO so that we can deliver our rich content to a wider audience in both the UK and overseas.
If you want any further information please do not hesitate to contact me.
Cheers
Julian
Julian Sambles
Head of Audience Development
Telegraph Media Group
Comment by Julian Sambles — July 8, 2008 @ 2:26 pm