Pic: Guardian
Q: You’re a leading outlet in a media market struggling for its life, competing with cheaper, more immediate operations which you consider amateurish – and they’re coming up better in search results than you are. What do you do?
A: Tell Google to move your results to the top.
It sounds like a simplified account, but that’s almost exactly what’s happening in the Googlesphere at the moment. Media giants have been talking in slightly negative terms for a long old while now, because its search algorithm doesn’t take into account that they pump more cash into content than their dwindling advertising revenues can cover.
I suppose it’s too much to expect huge media conglomerates to become literate in search engine optimisation – they have the resources for it, and are more than capable of controlling natural search.
Advertising Age’s Nat Ives has written an excellent account of the media giants’ war on PageRank, beginning by explaining how the media outlets have teamed together to gang up on big ol’ Google at its Publishers Advisory Counil, and elsewhere. Some choice quotes:
One executive parped:
You should not have a system where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately.
A publisher tooted:
This would in no way mean that only professional content publishers would get an advantage. It really just says that the original source, and the source with real access, should somehow be recognized as the most important in the delivery of results.
Most important? Well, it’s your content and you want ad revenue for it, so you would say that.
As Google itself has said in response, “there’s value to derivative content too”. The justification behind prioritising professionally made content seems pretty flaky to me. The likes of ESPN argue that because large media outlets have a constant production line of allegedly accurate, incisive and timely news which has less Google juice than the work of ‘link-happy’ bloggers and old news stories. Just fills you with sympathy, doesn’t it?
And as far as justification goes, that seems to be the only point the big-boy publishers have to make. Labelling bloggers as ‘parasites’ is a rather dumb thing to do. Yes, many hang their posts on a news story and then out-Google the original. But to discount the bloggers who add value to these stories simply shows that big media players don’t, by and large, get the web.
Google’s algorithm is established, and the fact that large media companies haven’t been able to manage their search optimisation should be none of Google’s concern. In my view, there should be no reason why the likes of ESPN don’t challenge bloggers and smaller news sites on a level playing field. If they care about search as much as they say they do, they’ll win out without too much trouble. They have the resources, after all.
I think Google should resist this in the strongest possible terms, and tell these organisations to tackle PageRank instead of trying to flex their muscles. I’ll leave you with the words of another publisher who put my argument rather better than I have, also from Nat’s Ad Age piece:
Google has designed an algorithm. They don’t owe us that we show up a particular way. They do publish a whole lot about how to make your site show up as much as possible. If people haven’t taken action on it, that’s their own damn fault.
