The death of quality journalism - or - how to give a story Google juice

By Trevor Cook - posted Friday, 14 March 2008


The Sydney Morning Herald got the story at the start of the world's news cycle and it had a fantastic opportunity to dip into rivers of search engine gold.

As bloggers and others take up a story and start talking about it, they link to the original piece, giving it google juice and pushing it up search engine rankings.

They also share the story through social networking sites like Facebook. When it comes to attracting casual news consumers, links and sharing are the name of the game.

But it takes a few hours for the links to do their magic, so The Sydney Morning Herald marketing team swung into operation to bid at auction for the right to own key search terms for those critical few hours between news of his death and when the search robots and algorithms took over.