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Repeat after me..."outbound links are not my enemy." Now say it again...one hundred million times! I don't know who pulled that on Caroline Little, the chief of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, but apparently it's sunk in and Little has decided to join with papers like The New York Sun and the Daily Oklahoman to embrace the new idea of including links to other papers' coverage of the same stories from right there within the Washington Post's own story text. In other words...these newspapers have decided to stop whining about competition from services like Google News and to start doing something to make their own sites more appealing to Internet users.
From the article:
"This lets us be a search engine," said Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for Opubco Communications Group, which publishes the Oklahoman and its Web site, NewsOK.com. "We look at it like we just hired 30,000 journalists, because now we can give you our story and what the rest of the world is saying about it."
The site’s roughly 700,000 registered users view about 36 million pages online each month, with each user viewing three to five pages per visit. And that is not enough to satisfy the demands of advertisers. Because Inform gives readers an easy way to find related stories that were published earlier on NewsOK.com, Ms. Fry said she expected the number of page views on the site to increase by at least threefold.
"People aren’t just reading one story," she said. "They’ll click deeper because of this, and I can load ads deeper into those pages. It really beefs up the site."
This burst of sanity from the traditional publishing world is something that's been missing for several years now. From the suits against Google by news outlets that were upset that Google was *gasp* pointing users to their web sites and sending free traffic...to the jealously guarded traffic that wasn't to be sent ANYWHERE with the exception of a high-paying advertiser, newspapers have long turned up their nose at the idea that outbound links might actually make people more likely to visit their site.
In reality, the opposite tends to be true. People enjoy sites that serve as good resources...as proven over and over by sites like Yahoo! and services like Google News. In fact, the Washington Posts' Little does an excellent job of pointing out the reality of quality outbound linking...
"Five years ago, everybody said you have to keep readers on your site, with no links out to other sites," said Caroline H. Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of the Washington Post Company. "But ultimately, people will go where they want to go."
"To the extent we can provide them more Washington Post video or more information from around the Web, we’re all for it," Ms. Little added. "And we get the benefit of that, too, because we get a lot of referrals from the Web, also."
Good for you Washington Post...let's hope that others learn from your example.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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