Keeping your Google juice

Some time ago a bunch of newspapers demanded to get a higher search rank from Google. The reason was that they wanted to be given a free-ride in page rank, instead of spending time at improving their SEO (search engine optimization) skills. Nice try, insert coin.

Now the New York Times has demonstrated an unfortunate lack of SEO skills. Their goal was to merge the International Herald Tribune website into New York Times. Unfortunately they failed miserably with regards to SEO and reduced 993 000 Google hits on IHT to one (1).

The reason behind this was that they redirected all IHT content to the start page of NYT, making the hits collapsed together by Google. In time Google will properly index the articles at their new destination, but they will lose most of their old Google juice in the process. This could have been avoided if they had setup proper redirection from the old addresses to the new ones, for instance by using “301 permanent redirect” or similar rule.

Note that this is not a bash specifically aimed at New York Times. I simply use their case as one example among many of what the consequences may be. When you create information on the web, there are a lot of things to consider. Since a majority of visitors often come from search engines such as Google, it’s very important to not skip the SEO part of the development process.