NY Times.com finally opens up to search engines
The New York Times may be the paper of record in print -- but it wasn't getting its due from search engines until recently. That's changed since Marshall Simmonds came on board as part of the newspaper publisher's purchase of About.com last year. In an interview, Search Engine Watch gets Simmonds to lay out how he made the Times easier to search. Some basic steps Simmonds took: Giving Yahoo, Google, and other search engines unfettered access to the website, whose registration requirements previously blocked them from indexing its pages. "Yahoo had indexed our registration page 20 million times," said Simmonds.
He's also trained writers and editors to write clearer headlines, a push that was skeptically documented by Times reporter Steve Lohr in April. Simmonds's revolutionary idea? Keep headlines simple and use the words that readers are likely to search with. The search push seems to be working: Simmonds says search-engine traffic to NYTimes.com is up 59 percent. pressure may have come from content searchers regiestering with the Washington Post... and, numbers may be up due to Google using the NYT as their news story links.
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