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.
