Adam Sherk

DECEMBER 14, 2010

I saw Malcolm Coles’ post on Google’s reading level scores for UK newspapers and thought it would be fun to do the same thing for US news sites. So what reading level does Google assign to major news sites in the US? How do the US news sites stack up? But which sites are aiming high or low? ABC News 41%. Boston.com 29%.

Sites 232

Sites News Google Yahoo 232

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 6, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? by Adam Sherk on October 6, 2010 It is safe to say that most news sites are now experimenting with various forms of user engagement and content promotion through social media. on their site).

Sites 176

Sites News Postrank Engagement 176

Adam Sherk

DECEMBER 3, 2013

Today I thought I’d check to see just how many news and content sites are among the top 500 pages on Google+. For the purposes of this exercise I counted traditional news organizations, lifestyle publications, Web-only news and content sites and broadcast channels/programs with a companion site. Google+ Page CircleCount.

News 161

News Sites Google Content 161

Adam Sherk

APRIL 13, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed by Adam Sherk on April 13, 2010 Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So which news sites fared best?

Sites 161

Sites News Yahoo Journal 161

Adam Sherk

MARCH 16, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites by Adam Sherk on March 16, 2010 The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news.

Sites 143

Sites News Yahoo Engineering 143

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags by Adam Sherk on February 19, 2010 Ever notice all the tags that some blogs add to their posts? Adding a few meaningful tags is fine, but news sites in particular have a habit of taking this practice much too far.

Sites 112

Sites News Press Release SEO 112

Adam Sherk

JULY 17, 2012

Which news site has the highest customer satisfaction rating? Its satisfaction score of 84 is six points higher than the #2 news site, ABCNews.com. Its satisfaction score of 84 is six points higher than the #2 news site, ABCNews.com. Not a surprising assessment as HuffPo is not exactly a simple, streamlined site.

Sites 125

Sites News Report Advertising 125

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 2, 2010

But I was curious to compare the data provided for major news sites. For the purposes of comparison I pulled the hostrank, inbound links and site pages data for 30+ major news sites. In the table below the news sites are ranked by hostrank. Hostrank Inbound links Site pages. 1 BBC News 7,660.6 5,841,700 1,642,485.

Sites 112

Sites News Postrank SEO 112

Adam Sherk

JULY 23, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk The Most Buried News Sites on Digg by Adam Sherk on July 23, 2009 It’s no secret that mainstream news sites are experiencing increased exposure on social news sites like Digg. Using di66.net’s 403 14 dailymail.co.uk 387 15 telegraph.co.uk

Digg 119

Digg Sites News Yahoo 119

Adam Sherk

JUNE 15, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact? But Twitter, Facebook in some cases Digg still represent the majority of social media referrals to many news sites, so they continue to be a priority. 2,461,060 2 @cnnbrk 77.3% 3,139,883 3 @TIME 76.9%

News 165

News Sites Twitter Digg 165

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 14, 2012

What types of sites get the most links from Pinterest? I spend a lot of time auditing websites which means I am regularly in the Google Webmaster Tools profiles for a variety of sites. Lately I’ve been noticing some impressive Pinterest link counts in the linking domains report under “Links to Your Sites.”

Survey 166

Survey Sites Publishing NoFollow 166

Adam Sherk

JUNE 9, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages by Adam Sherk on June 9, 2010 Between privacy issues, a sweaty CEO and technical problems with its “Like&# buttons Facebook is having a rough time lately. The short answer? Not so many.

News 181

News Sites Yahoo Facebook 181

Adam Sherk

APRIL 19, 2011

But in terms of keyword targeting, how different is eHow from major news sites? To get a rough idea I used SEMRush to look at the sites that have the most keywords in common with eHow. So at a very basic level the more common keywords two sites share, the more similar they are at least in terms of keyword targeting.

Sites 125

Sites News Posterous Reputation 125

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 14, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Help Haiti: News Sites Promote Ways to Donate by Adam Sherk on January 14, 2010 As the devastation and human tragedy caused by the Haiti earthquake grows, people are flocking to the news media for information, and more importantly to learn ways that they can help.

News 129

News Sites Digg Press Release 129

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 7, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites by Adam Sherk on August 7, 2009 This week’s Sysomos study of the 5% most active users on Twitter includes a list of the top 25 users (with more than 50,000 followers) ranked by average tweets per day. tweets per day.

Sites 105

Sites News Strategy Twitter 105

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 17, 2010

But at this early stage, how strong are the marketing opportunities for news sites? At a minimum news sites should set up an official profile and experiment with “buzz this” buttons on their templates. Facebook itself is making a push to get users to create personalized news channels that benefit both users and news sites.

Sites 118

Sites News Google Facebook 118

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 4, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers? Do they want to follow and interact with specific media sites? They also made 29 comments; that’s a very low number but most of the other sites have not made any.

Digg 134

Digg Sites News Activities 134

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites by Adam Sherk on October 8, 2009 Although search engines keep improving on their ability to deal with duplicate content, this continues to be one of the main SEO issues facing news and content sites.

Sites 105

Sites News Syndication Content 105

Adam Sherk

APRIL 16, 2013

Infinite scrolling has been growing in popularity with various forms being utilized on a variety of sites. Social sites use infinite scrolling as a way to offer a never-ending stream of new content, and it has appeal for sites that want to offer a seamless browsing experience for large groups of items. Don’t Forget SEO.

SEO 245

SEO Tips Module Guidelines 245

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 10, 2014

To get an idea of where things currently stand, I pulled 2013 referral data for a selection of 52 magazine and content sites, all well-known brands from major publishers. Here are the averages for the year, according to each site’s Referrer Types report in Omniture: Search 37.8%. Other Web Sites 22.3%. Social Media 10.2%.

Publishing 198

Publishing Hitwise Social Media Analysis 198

Adam Sherk

APRIL 3, 2013

Then in a second reminder Google made it clear that they do not want sponsored content indexed in Google News, and sites that mix in promotional articles with their regular news content could be excluded from Google News entirely. Partnering with ecommerce sites is another revenue growth area for publishers. What About Partner Links?

Guidelines 260

Guidelines SEO NoFollow Module 260

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 11, 2014

I started with the sites surveyed in my post on search and social traffic and then added several more newspaper, magazine and content sites, for a total of 70 brands. These are all sites that we currently work with so I’m going to keep the titles anonymous. Here’s a breakdown by percentile. Less than 20% 0.

Mobile 164

Mobile Publishing Hitwise Patterns 164

Adam Sherk

APRIL 17, 2014

I thought I’d share some of my favorites that are well suited to editorial content sites. These real-time analytics platforms are among the most popular with news and content sites. Spike from NewsWhip is well-suited to news sites with good functionality for both journalists and marketers. Real-Time Analytics. Social Crawlytics.

Analytics 240

Analytics Publishing Social Media Tools 240

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 7, 2014

While not a keyword research tool, the Search Queries section in Google Webmaster Tools offers a good way to find out what terms are currently driving search impressions and clicks for your site: This will help you to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and what topical areas you can potentially expand on. SimilarWeb.

Analysis 241

Analysis Research Trends Tools 241

Adam Sherk

MARCH 8, 2012

One interesting takeaway was the user base and types of content that do well in Social Reader can be quite different from the main site. The key point here is that user intent and behavior varies by social site and as compared to search and direction navigation. Are we creating optimized experiences for social media visitors?

Publishing 215

Publishing Questions Social Media Activities 215

Adam Sherk

APRIL 26, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk An Early Look at Facebook Open Graph Protocol Integration on News Sites by Adam Sherk on April 26, 2010 There has been a lot of news and reaction around Facebook’s new additions to the Facebook Platform: Social Plugins, the Open Graph protocol and the Graph API.

News 149

News Module Widget Facebook 149

Adam Sherk

JULY 23, 2013

Or put together a case study with several news sites to come up with a percentage on how often the using the standout tag generated a “Featured” label, and what kind of traffic it drove? But I can share anecdotally that “Featured” articles from a variety of news sites do appear on the Google News home page with some frequency.

News 213

News Google Publishing Case Study 213

Adam Sherk

MAY 14, 2013

A good way to investigate this is to review the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools, which shows URLs with 404, 500 and other errors that Google encountered while crawling the site. However it is important to do this in way that adds value on each specific site. Partner links. Smart syndication. Shine or MSN Living.

Publishing 209

Publishing Module Syndication Badge 209

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 6, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Newsweek on Tumblr: Good Effort, Needs More Engagement by Adam Sherk on January 6, 2010 Awareness of Newsweek’s Tumblr site has been increasing of late. That’s critical for giving the site stand-alone value as opposed to just being a feeder site to Newsweek.com.

Tumblr 131

Tumblr Engagement Press Release Syndication 131

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 22, 2011

Google’s expanded sitelinks give sites greater exposure for branded searches and the ability to dominate the page one results above the fold. That means that sites should take advantage of the opportunity to increase clickthroughs to those pages by optimizing their META description tags in a slightly different way.

Google 215

Google URL Sites Issues 215

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction by Adam Sherk on November 3, 2009 With all the buzz about Twitter Lists I thought I’d take a look at how some major news sites are doing so far with their own Lists.

News 136

News List Twitter Sites 136

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 14, 2015

Some are newer, others are longstanding, but I wanted to gather them together and focus on the benefits for news and content sites. The support information on the Google Developers site covers the main opportunities. Site Speed. fewer sudden, radical changes) but it’s also left some quality sites that were hit by Panda 4.1

SEO 100

SEO Syndication Marketing NoFollow 100

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 10, 2012

Most are from the US but there are a handful of international sites too. Normally in posts like Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? I stick to mainstream news sites, but this time I expanded the scope a little to include TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web and CNET.

Organization 218

Organization News Engagement Google 218

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 28, 2012

To be clear, a large part of any Facebook strategy focuses on newsfeed visibility and on-site promotion through tactics like EdgeRank optimization, frictionless sharing , like and subscribe buttons , Open Graph tags, Facebook Comments and other Facebook Social Plugins. Related posts: Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?

News 199

News Facebook Case Study Conference 199

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 25, 2012

So I pulled the 2009-2011 Reddit and Digg referral figures for selection of 12 major magazine and Web-only content sites. I’m not able to reveal the specific sites or figures due to confidentially requirements but they are all well established brands. The numbers represent visits, not pageviews. We’ll see if they can stem the tide.

Digg 149

Digg Reddit Survey Publishing 149

Adam Sherk

JULY 9, 2013

It can be focused on a limited number of priority topics or applied on a larger scale, essentially mapping out a site’s entire universe of coverage. To be clear the aim here is not to encourage sites to create content solely for SEO, or to take things to a content farm-like extreme. Keyword Research for Content Planning. Google Trends.

Research 183

Research Content Hitwise Adwords 183

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 24, 2010

by Adam Sherk on August 24, 2010 As first covered by Malcolm Coles and later confirmed by Google , for search queries that include a specific domain Google is now showing a larger number of results from that site on page one. But do the expanded results apply to the embedded news and video listings in the SERPs?

News 113

News List Google Embedding 113