Google Should Rank Us First, Say Media Bigs

Should official news sources get favorable treatment in Google’s search results? A lot of publishers think so. That’s the gist of a story today by Advertising Age’s Nat Ives, which quotes one (obviously discontented) “content executive” as saying: “You should not have a system where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately.”

Well, then, just call this entire post parasitic.

The idea of Google rankings being determined, in part, by the credibility of the source sounds promising on the surface, but think about it a little, and it raises all kinds of questions about what constitutes worthy content. To make a system like this work, you’d have to come up with some Good Housekeeping-style Seal of Approval method for separating content’s wheat from content’s chaff, and even then, it would probably be utterly flawed. Is it parasitic when the NBC Nightly News does its own version, quoting the same sources, of a story that appeared in that morning’s New York Times? Or is it not parasitic because NBC News, like The New York Times, is considered worthy content by the media elite,  who have lost a lot of ground over the last few years to the parasites? Is a piece on Huffington Post parasitic because it spins off of a story from the traditional media and the HuffPo (sniff!) is only a blog? Michael Wolff tells Ives the complaints from old-school publishers about Google rankings are “the plaintive cry of people who have lost their monopoly trying to scrounge a little of it back.”

Fortunately, Ives also mentions another reason why publishers don’t necessarily rank very high in Google search results: they’ve been slow to adapt their content to better work with Google’s algorithms. Far too often, Web sites of major off-line content producers simply shovel print content onto the Web, or betray a pathological fear of linking outside of their own sites, or don’t write Google-friendly headlines — and often, all three together. If you’re doing all this and your Web site still can’t get arrested in Google’s search results with the same frequency as Wikipedia does, well, then, maybe you have a legitimate beef.