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Necessary evil

"At this month's Online Publishers Association conference in London, WAN managing director Ali Rahnema asked: 'Could this content exist if someone else wasn't paying to create it?' Well, in the quaint Americanism of my hillbilly roots, I'd say Rahnema got this bassackwards. Instead, we soon will be asking, 'Could this content exist if someone else wasn't linking to it?'

"The truth is that today, Google is every site's front page. If you can't find content via searches, or via aggregators such as GoogleNews and Digg.com, or via links from blogs, then the content and the brand behind it might as well not exist. This is how online sites get traffic. This is the means of distributing your content online. If you don't like it, there are easy ways to stop it: you can place a file on your website to tell Google and other robots to stay away, or you can put your content behind a registration or pay wall. But to cut yourself off from search and links is like taking your paper off the newsstand and making people go out of their way to find it. What sane publisher would do that?

"Sane publishers are, instead, engaging in the black art of the age: 'search-engine optimization' (SEO), which means making your content easily findable via Google and company. I am a believer. Full disclosures: I work with the New York Times Company's About.com, which has become a top-10 site via SEO. It is a wonder. I am also working with a startup that, not unlike Google, organizes news, because I believe this will help bring readers to relevant reporting. And I advise newspapers that all their content - including their archives - should be online, for every search engine, aggregator and blog to find."