Comments on: Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:38:25 +0000

I didn’t have such a beef with Google in this post.

By: Michael Bower

Michael Bower — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:02:58 +0000

Not to be annoying, but why are you using YouTube to host your video if you have such a beef with Google?

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:11:04 +0000

Those who are with Google here (and on other aspects) don’t realize Google can take over their own market they dominate today. Then they will sing a swan song too.

By: Hendy Irawan

Hendy Irawan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:54:37 +0000

I’m not lucky enough to run a big news site like WSJ, but I guess there’s a lot of pressure in it. Perhaps when in the old days with some money you can control everything, nowadays it’s much harder, and sometimes the “littler” guys get more control for less money –but they’re smarter and more internet-marketing-savvy.

By: Oleg Temple

Oleg Temple — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:50:22 +0000

I have always been skeptical about the value of the PPC campaigns, I think that targeted traffic is far more important than PPC which opens the door for fraud. Unfortunately, clients are generally of the mainstream opinion that a site that has 10000 random visitors per day is better than one that has 500 distilled visitors from a specific sector. People are also often forced to write “original content” on nonsensical, everyday, commonsense topics such as “10 easy steps to lose weight” or “SEO for dummies”. Thus, I believe that search engines waste the time of the writer and the reader by creating a demand for irrelevant content and link-spamming robots. I am in the process of launching our international business directory, The Cornerstones of World Business, but I am not going to just roll over and go with the flow. Yes, it is so much slower to contact people and partners personally and write articles with genuine content, but in the end, I believe the yield will be much more solid and reliable. If more people would focus on improving their website with relevant content instead of doing whatever it takes to win the battle for PR and keywords we would have a better internet for all. It is not Google that controls us, it is we who influence their policies with our greed for traffic. There is always someone willing to take shortcuts and work a little less – write a string of keywords instead of an article, etc. Eventually, others catch on and think of doing the same, very soon they run into each other and begin to compete and eventually we have and industry and the Google-worshiping society we have now. People spend incredulous resources and time to appease search engine robots rather than create a good site for their human users. Google as a corporation is only doing what comes naturally to them: if we surrender control, they will gladly take over and if we let go of our values, they will make up some new ones for us.

By: Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:08:31 +0000

Funny, most news sites seem to be working to get more Google crawls and more Google clicks and the WSJ is asking for less. I can't imagine anything more stupid than insulting a female Google VP publicly with wanton accusations of promiscuity if I were running a media outlet. Why does NewsCorp want to start a war they can only lose?

By: Tom Foremski

Tom Foremski — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:20:10 +0000

Yes, I agree, I’m a bit tired about this argument over Google and the value of the traffic they send.

I think there is a larger tragedy: even if the aggregators gave every penny they make to the content producers it still wouldn’t be enough to cover the costs of the creators. Advertising is not a good way for news creators to make money, it’s gong to have to be what I call a “Heinz 57″ model, newspapers will need a wide variety of revenues from ads, lead gen, affiliate marketing, etc. It’s no fun being a publisher if you have to manage so many revenue streams but I don’t see any other solution.

By: MyTriState

MyTriState — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:19:57 +0000

The WSJ would lose tons of ad revenue from their pay per impression banners on their site if they didn’t have a flood of free users coming in from search engines like google. Any newspaper site would be NUTS to block google!
Thanks!

By: interval

interval — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:55:52 +0000

Its simply more of the same loathing of new technology. The web has indeed changed everything; but not the way purveyors of mass media were hoping. I remember when I first started in IT in the late 80’s, my boss at that time wanted to try to make the office paperless. It took over 30 years, but its starting to happen. Newspapers are a waste of trees, and news gathering and editing is not quite the chore it was when physical paper was in play. Like the buggy whip, new organizations need to realize their time of charging premium fees for the kind of work they do is over. Its time to get a new career, not try to shame people into giving them the money they were used to “in the good old days”. I don’t have anything personal against anyone in the news media profession, but I know when to shoot a lame horse.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:27:27 +0000

And if I were in the news press business, I would also consider the following strategies & tactics:

* Insert a story in robots.txt to prevent it from appearing on Google for 6-12 hours. This way, people will gradually learn that stuff on your own homepage is always fresher than stuff they’re getting through an aggregator. If you can get the other guys to do the same, so much the better.

* Offer your own aggregator (but not algorithm-based, put a human on the job) linking to stories beyond your site that COMPLEMENT your coverage. Looking at Google’s “clusters” of 100+ articles for each news item, I always wonder – how many of them are exact copies of each other and anyway, what’s the BEST one? I don’t want to read 100 to find out. If my newspaper not only did an excellent job covering a topic but also suggested to me 2-3 more articles that cover the same topic from a DIFFERENT angle, I would love that!

* Stop writing generic content. 95% of stuff in NYT is predictable and can be replaced by reading the wire. Or Google News. Even if it’s marginally better written, it’s not that compelling. Krugman is interesting, whether or not you agree with him. Nobody goes to Google News to find Krugman’s articles. You go to the NYT and find it. Publish a directory of your writers on the FRONT PAGE. This is who you’re promoting.

So, more personality, more opinion, more quality, keep Google waiting for a few hours and offer your readers a window onto the world beyond your newspaper.