Lyn Gardner and the dark art of search engine logic

Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.

Patrick Judd
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Are set changes an integral part of a performance?

I find that they provide a mysterious perspective on the inner workings of a theatre. In the case of Yukio Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night, the set changes engendered an unexpected mood of cathartic mise-en-abîme. A sense of infinite regression heightened perhaps by a back-drop of mirrors on stage where, if I had been more attentive, I may have seen Lyn Gardner idly taking notes in amongst the sea of voyeurs.

Lyn Gardner wrote a piece about the performance for The Guardian (she didn’t like the set changes). I invite you to view the source code of her article (toolbar > view > source). Google sucks up the syntactical nutrients contained in this story within a story and spews out the title and a short description of the article on the search results page for ‘Shockiku Grand Kabuki’. Being included in the first 10 links returned, based on a Google search is the search engine optimisation (SEO) sweet spot and the Guardian’s ability to reach it consistently is no coincidence. The Guardian employs SEO specialists to make sure that the Guardian’s online pages appear relevant to Google. You are not the primary audience for the article nor are you the judge of its relevance or quality. This is Google’s privilege.

In their headlong rush to survive, online newspapers have exposed the rocky truth of their existence: they thrive by spamming Google (and a host of other smaller but collectively important referral sources). Lyn Gardner’s true purpose at the Guardian is to produce search engine friendly copy. Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.

A small degree away from the dark art of search engine logic, there is the minefield of web-analytics. Web-analytics is the bucket that processes the ‘cognitive surplus’ of the Internet; the system that trends the ebb and the flow of online traffic over time. If you click on one of the links above (effectively a request for the page) it will, amongst other things, run JavaScript code in your browser which in combination with an invisible image request and a tracking cookie will send data back to a remote server where it will eventually be pushed to a reporting interface. This process is commonly called ‘page tagging’.

Page tagging allows the Guardian’s web-analytics software to faithfully record the fact that something has requested a file defined as Lyn Gardner’s article. If you have never visited the site before, you will be counted as a unique visitor to that page. ‘Unique Visitor’ is a euphemism for an Internet enabled device. It is assumed that a person is controlling the device but it could just as well be an automated script. The nature or rather quality of the visit is irrelevant: the quantity of visits is what matters.

At some point, behind the scenes coding became more important than the journalistic front of house authoritative first take on daily events. This is a world away from the beauty of Ninagawa’s vision but just like set changes, it has to be considered.

effisk

"The nature or rather quality of the visit is irrelevant: the quantity of visits is what matters".

Wrong. The quality of the visit is relevant, and getting more so as the market is competitive. When you are the only one providing the information visitors are looking for, they have no choice but to read your page. When there are competitors, visitors will visit several of the pages that show up in the search results. They will compare the content of each of these pages, decide which one is the most relevant and remember that choice. Next time they do a similar search, they will go straight to the website that answered the query if it shows up in the first results, or even type the website's name in the query to narrow down the search to the best resources.

Websites like The Guardian online don't just want to get more visitors from search engine; they need these visitors to come back, and in order to do so, then need relevant and interesting articles, not just search engine friendly content.

"Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance."
This is a short term strategy, it doesn't pay on the long term, and I'm sure all these online papers are aware of that.
Andrew Eglinton

@effisk welcome to LTB. Thanks for taking the time out to comment. I agree that it is a successful combination of good content and search engine optimization that online media publishers are after. But I think P. Judd is being sardonic when he says - “The nature or rather quality of the visit is irrelevant: the quantity of visits is what matters” - it reads to me as a criticism of news organisations still pushing for quantity over quality in their analytics strategies.

There's also a third crucial component in current publishing practice and that's social media. The news sites still think in terms of 'eyeballs' on their own sites, whereas a great deal of media is consumed and discussed across social networks, away from websites. We rely increasingly on our network of 'friends' or 'followers' to channel information of interest from around the Web through various social networks. We may not know these people at all, and certainly wouldn't call them 'friends' in the physical world, but we follow their activities because we know they will source quality content. In this sense they become 'nodes' in the network and a successful publisher knows which 'nodes' to channel content through.
effisk

thanks.

Very true about the social media, but it still comes down to a similar equation: a catchy twitt has to point to a good article. If not, your followers will not discuss or re-twitt your stories and they'll unfollow you. The "SEO+quality content" equation is replaced by a "catchy titles+quality content" here.
Stephen Pitchers

I fear this article suffers under a syllogism; jumping from a production method and marketing tool to a sacrifice of editorial and journalistic credibility. Given that the article also appeared in the print edition, and allowing for an assumption that the Guardian's journalists do not take their lead from the publication’s marketing department, how can we jump to the conclusion that ‘Lyn Gardner’s true purpose at the Guardian is to produce search engine friendly copy’?

By its very nature, SEO is manipulative and skewing. It is one way of making sure that something can be found when it is being searched out. The darkness of this art and the potential for abuse, can be found when search engine users are unaware of how their results have been gathered and presented. Is it surprising that the guardian attempts to market its articles? No. In the same way a print newspaper uses direct mail marketing or a subscription promotion to reach doormats, websites use SEO to top search results. What is the difference when the content of the article remains the same? The main difference is how unsettling and penetrating the latter form of marketing can be. Yes, it is scary. Behavioral targeting from Phorm, context-sensitive ads in Gmail, and narrow marketing tools such as ad words, all add to a form of advertising that attempts to catch hold of a desire and coax a click.

Once we become aware of SEO, we can also see how incredibly useful it is at filtering and prioritising search results albeit without our knowledge. As a tool for shortening the distance between the seeker and the desired object, SEO is streamlining consumerism and attempting to reduce the effort required to search. Lazy? Yes. Useful? Yes.

Another thing noteworthy: sometimes SEO will only get you so far. Type ‘Shockiku Grand Kabuki [sic]’ into google and this article is no. 1. This is because unless SEO accommodates potential misspellings, human error prevails and does its own self-inflicted skewing!
pjudd

Very interesting comment.

I would fully agree with you if offline and online were regarded as separate entities when it comes to overall strategy. However, the Guardian (as well as all the other titles) practices cross-channel promotion (a vanity URL in the newspaper, which redirects to an online section for example).

I am sure that journalists would like to believe that they are not involved in the wider digital strategy but their cooperation is required during the article creation phase in the content management system. It is a journalist’s responsibility to consider headline (training is given on how to create a search engine friendly headline) source and article description (metadata) carefully when writing a column. A journalist should be aware of all the places that his or her article might appear.

I find your thoughts on behavioural targeting spot-on (the imprecision of survey/panel-driven analysis gives a newspaper reader a greater degree of anonymity funnily enough).

As you point out, newspapers use many different methods to market their offline content but the offline channel is more mature and indeed fractured than online. Please correct me if I am wrong but I do not think that a Google kind of monopoly exists when it comes to traditional print marketing. That is the difference despite the content often being the same online and offline. My point is that when it comes to online, the distribution/publication channel (which is one of the many things that Google has become) is becoming more important than the content itself.

SEO is not only streamlining the path that links consumer to content but also limiting it because it is easier to make editorial changes than it is to change Google’s proprietary ranking algorithm.

You are right of course. The only salvation might be our own weaknesses. In my case a typo and in Google’s case…I am not sure. Arrogance?