News sites: Drop baseview … Blog your stories and up your traffic
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Update: This post was written when I was misinformed about baseview. Although I still don’t like it because it creates rich text characters and ASCII squares when copying text from it and pasting the text into Movable Type blogs, I know that it’s not Baseview that is creating the URL issues. Regardless, news sites should change up their URLs for SEO purposes.
Here’s one of the nastiest words I ever hear: Baseview. It’s the feed system that many newspapers use to send stories to online news sites where the stories are converted to .xml format for display - please correct me if I didn’t explain that right.
The problem with the Baseview feed system is stories are often sent through with numbered story identifiers, three-to-four letter categories and a collections code for each separate paper that is sent through.
Here’s how a baseview address may typically breakdown:
/news-37/1185369908324430.xml&coll=6
- news-37 = the newspaper category code - broken down into things such as news, entertainment, sports, ect.
- 1185369908324430 = unique story identifier
- coll=6 = paper collections code - all stories with this code belong to one particular paper and can be grouped
Why is this a problem?
There’s no way that I can possibly know what the story is about by looking at this address. If I am a reader and want to send this link to a friend, by looking at the link address, it’s unlikely my friend could tell me that this story was written by what newspaper and that the article has to do with a softball accident.
So what, right? You should just click the link to find that out.
Well, think about it this way. Let’s pretend Google is our friend. And we want to send the link to Google for indexing. Or, rather, the news site wants to send the article to Google for indexing so more people searching for that specific newspaper and “softball” may come across this story.
But Google can’t understand that address either. SEO (search engine optimization) plummeting commences.
So why blog?
Ever wonder why blogs rank so high in Google? Part of the reason is they are updated often, and when content changes on the front page of a site, Google pays attention.
But the one of the biggest reasons that Google loves blogs is the URL of articles within blogs often contains a keyword’d address.
For example, here’s an entry from the newslog of the Grand Rapids Press:
http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2007/07/
police_expect_to_charge_15year.html
Notice that the paper (grpress) is there, although not completely recognizable. Also, the tease of the story is there ( police_expect_to_charge_15year).
Brilliant!
People browsing Google for the “Grand Rapids Press” and “police” or “15-year-old” or “charge” are now much more likely to find the story that breaks on the Grand Rapids blog.
As SEO in Google and other search engines rise, so does the likelihood that more readers will visit the Grand Rapids Press blog to read more stories. Hence, traffic and readership may increase.
Anyone had experience blogging their stories and noticed this trend? Any reasons to keep baseview? What do you think?
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July 27th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Hey Shawn-
Just a little note of correction here. The URL you are citing “/news-37/1185369908324430.xml&coll=6″ isn’t really a Baseview product. I believe that’s a homegrown CMS operation we have. No matter what system our newspapers use, the online company translates it into a URL like that.
Not all of our newspaper partners use Baseview, but all of their stories generate a URL like that.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
You can’t win them all. Thanks for the correction, Eric. I think the main point I wanted to make is stories should have a better description in their URL than the random number sequence. I’ll do better research next time
August 28th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
I don’t believe the newspapers control the slug or url at all. It’s the online site - just try and find a single davison flagstaff url on mlive.com
August 29th, 2007 at 5:59 am
I think you’re right M, The URL is controlled in the transfer of the story from the paper to the online site and how the online site displays the story. However, newspapers can control the URL of their stories to a certain extent by using blogs, which often take the words in the headline of a blog post to make up parts of the URL. This is important because it gives reason for papers and content providers to write headlines that are keyword-rich and also understandable by web readers. For example, http://blog.mlive.com/2007/08/davison_flagstaff_council_rejects_water_bill not only tells the reader a little bit about what the story is but also tells the search engines. By using blogs, newspapers and content providers can control their story URLs to a certain extent.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Yep. We need a better content system
if we want the search engine gods to favor us
December 11th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
I can understand your wanting to see the content IN the link, but don’t forget, the ultimate purpose of a link is to get you there - not offer a preview.
And while none of us knows what’s in these black boxes called search engines, I certainly don’t think that we can think of it as fact that the search engines weigh url-encoded words within their SERPs anymore. In fact, I believe this method to be somewhat antiquated, probably due to how impractical it turned out to be once optimizers tried to implement such a system - not to mention how easy it is to spam/stack url’s. I mean, really, what is the difference between keywords in url’s vs. the old description meta tags - that the search engines learned to ignore really quick?
January 19th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I see that this is an older post but I’ll throw this out there too. There are Transporter plug-ins (that you probably already own) that export articles and can strip the ascii characters. Plus, they can also replace the long filename with the headline or slug. See this example from a MediaSpan hosted website:
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SantaFeNorthernNM/Struggling_students_to_get_double_dose_of_math__English
(I used to be a Product Manager with MediaSpan/Baseview and had to deal with this all the time.)
May 18th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Old post with timeless value.
Think you can sell news stories without compelling headlines? That’s what BaseView seems to think.
Please notice that my url is the search term. I bought it in late January this year and it’s currently #3 despite almost no promotion whatsoever, although it hovered around #9 for several months.
That’s why Google provides the allintitle and allinurl search modifiers (true search engine optimization, btw)- because dead serious webmasters will put their search term in the title and url, aimed at people as well as search engines.