I essentially agree with you. I just believe it is healthy to think out the extreme scenario, which for some is; for all intents and purposes, removing content from the index, as a test to see if that could change visitor behavior (which could be measured on a KPI such as Returning Visitors). AND – for some, this might actually be true.

Cheers
d.

but people can get the news you want to delay very easily from other sites.

Instead of trying to achieve a graph like figure 2, why not ignore the “Total visitors” metric, but make “Returning visitors” and – maybe more interesting as a short term metric – “2nd visit/1st visit” the KPIs?

I would concentrate more on Alec’s “that the science website had genuinely interesting and well written content, whereas the other websites had ‘news’. Our recommendations [...] was to write ‘evergreen’ content and analysis for long term gains”

An analysis of the top seen (top rated if available) content of the 2nd visits could be quite insightful.

so long
nic

Anyone can apply a disallow in their robots.txt file, making money off of the action is an entirely different thing – and if nothing else, we should give Mr. Murdoch credit for trying.

cheers
d. :-)

Of course you can use it in your presentation, although I would struggle to back it up with data given that I don’t work there any more. :)

RE News Corp and Bing – I read an interesting comment on Slashdot that stated that Ballmer was calling Murdoch’s bluff. The Bing offer does everything Murdoch claims he would like, but with the disadvantage of not being linked to in Google. Really he wants Google to make this offer, or force them to make the offer through the courts on legislation of ‘stealing’ their content so that they don’t have to be removed from Google. The Bing offer just puts him in a difficult situation of either waiting out on Google to make a similar offer; admitting defeat and staying with the current model; Going for the fremium option that has been talked about (and possibly failing). Interesting times ahead.

Cheers,
Alec

I am happy to see that you are not completely offended by me using your post as a starting point – and ever happier to see your conclusion: “that we are SCARED shitless of Google” :-)

Seems like we are on the same page after all.

Cheers
d.

I’m very happy to see you took one of my posts to start this discussion. Rereading it, I see that the sarcasm part of the “We LOVE Google” phrase could not necessarily be seen. The phrase was meant to be a double entendre about the fact that Google is bringing the vast majority of traffic to my wife’s site (thank you!), and that we are SCARED shitless of Google (what if it stopped indexing it well??).

Hence our shouting “We LOVE Google” the same way people in some countries salute their “Dear Leaders”…

As for the Diet Cokes, I won’t be in Chicago, but I will certainly figure out a way to get them someday, somewhere in the world!

Great input. I assume I can quote you on the above? (My slides are mostly back drops, so it will be verbally)

>>Maybe the ‘news’ should not be put up for the first 24 hours and the value add should be pushed as premium (as in the eConsultancy website which you just gave an interview for :) ).

..and this is actual a model which seems to work very well for them.

Cheers
d.

We did some analysis for a large science based consumer magazine in my previous job on the visitors who came in to the site from search. We grouped people into those that arrived at new content from search engines (ie within the last month) with those that arrived at the home page, from RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc into a large group of consumers with similar habits. Those visitors would come back time and time again, regardless of how they found the content – because they’d been hooked.

We grouped those that came in from Search engines to older content (older than a year was the baseline I took, I think) and they turned out to be unlikely to stay on the site, but also significant in volume (up to 20%) and quite steady over time.

Our recommendations were that the site should revisit high volume content from the past and add links to newer content to encourage users to stay and become more brand aware. Ideally this would be done manually within the content itself, but if not then another solution would be to make sure that right hand panels and bottom panels were automated to be able to provide the relevant related content. This meant, of course, making sure that their automated system was clever enough (a step that wasn’t easy in itself).

It led to a number of questions across other sites that we ran analytics for, most prevalent was why did this site get more visits to its old content than some of the other sites? The answer, almost always was that the science website had genuinely interesting and well written content, whereas the other websites had ‘news’. Our recommendations to the other websites was to write ‘evergreen’ content and analysis for long term gains, rather than churning press releases for ‘news’ and instant gratification. The ‘news’ the users could get anywhere, the stuff they were producing had to be unique and value add. Maybe the ‘news’ should not be put up for the first 24 hours and the value add should be pushed as premium (as in the eConsultancy website which you just gave an interview for :) ).

Thanks for the thumbs up.

>>What might be even better for content owners is to get paid to de-optimize for Google. See Steve Ballmer’s plan with News Corp.

Yes! I am not entirely sure this will happen though – unless – the content owner has “control” over a HUGE part of the page 1 SERP’s for the most popular search phrases. Which is why I get surprised every year when Wikipedia asks for Donations. They should promptly send an invoice to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – as any of those three engines would be heavily amputated without their content. I am not sure I see any of the individual news papers being able to do this, so unless they create a coalition, I don’t think it will happen beyond perhaps a test. BUT I am excited! :-)

Cheers
d.