SEO Blog

2008 will be a difficult year for large sections of the mainstream or traditional media.  As noted by Michele Gershberg her GlobeandMail.com Technology column today, (U.S. media face troubling 2008) the shift in ad budgets from traditional mass broadcasts to the behavioural and referential targeting of search poses a deeper threat to the mainstream media in 2008.

Already hit hard by declines in classified advertising revenues, the print media is preparing to take even heavier losses as advertisers move their money to opportunities found in organic and paid search.

quote:

Leading media executives and sports commissioners will discuss their strategies at the Reuters Media Summit in New York from Nov. 26 through Nov. 29.

Experts say advertisers need to remain competitive in a tightening market while keeping costs down, making them likely to boost spending in areas more directly linked to commerce, such as Web search queries.

That would benefit companies like Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. But television networks like CBS or NBC and Web companies like Yahoo Inc. that rely on brand advertising could suffer.

“We see continued strength in paid search and continued strength in retail e-commerce, and possibly an acceleration of online video,” said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay.

They say it’s not official until someone puts it in writing. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Google amended its webmaster guidelines to include a line reading:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

The line replaced a less stringent warning which only mentioned the buying of links in order to improve a site’s ranking.

This is likely the last word on bought and sold links for the time being but it re-enforces the values of “whitehat” SEO Metamend is known for following. Our SEO work tends to focus on improving websites for spiders and live-user conversions and not as heavily on the acquisition of incoming links.

Those involved in the selling of links are urged to study up on the rel=”nofollow” attribute .