Media Sites Lagging in Search Traffic
Do MSM [main stream media] brands get their fair share of search engine traffic or are they being squeezed out by content mill mercenaries? In order to answer this question, I looked at how much traffic the top 100 MSM brands get from the domains of the primary search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL and Ask) versus the amount of traffic the top 100 reference sites get from these same sources. ...
On first blush, it appears that the MSM brands get a comparable amount of traffic as the Reference sites (1.0 bil monthly page views for MSM brands versus 1.1 bil monthly page views for reference sites). However, in its ongoing struggle to Do No Evil, Google (and other search engines) actually give preference to MSM Brands by referring traffic to these sites through services such as Google news. When you factor out this traffic (which reference sites such as Answers.com do not receive), the top 100 MSM brand sites actually get less search traffic overall than the top 100 reference sites. I would argue that this demonstrates that the MSM brand sites are actually not getting their fair share of search traffic. In fact, the top 100 MSM brand sites get only 15% of their traffic from search, while the top 100 reference sites get over 30% of their traffic from search. Clearly, MSM brands are lagging when it comes to winning search traffic.
// Comment // This probably is not ground-breaking news, but this post goes on to explain why MSM lags reference sites in search traffic, citing the content mills' avid attention to SEO practices (the worst of which fall just shy of spam) combined with MSM's general disinterest for those practices.
// Adding a good Facebook exchange on this topic with Jay Small, thought leader at Scripps.
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