How is the subscription model of large websites going to affect search?
26-03-2010
The Times and the Sunday Times announced today that they were going to start charging for access to their online content.
So how is this development going to affect search engines and ultimately your clients' sites?
First of all, the number of high quality sites (page rank) in the Google index is going to drop. Secondly, the number of news aggregator sites, such as News Now UK, will disappear.
But how is this going to affect your rankings?
One of the major influences on the authority of your site is the number of relevant, high quality inbound links. The Google "Page Rank" - or page trust - is a logarithmic scale for measuring the relative importance of a site and the contained pages. This page rank (AKA Link Juice) is passed from site to site by its links. It slowly degrades the further this juice is passed.
Could this fundamentally break the page rank equation?
My concern is that if all of the media sellers are watching the Times' experiment - and if it proves to be successful, many more news sites will follow suit.
A large void in page rank could be created when these sites remove their content from the search engines' indexes. So this lack of rank will be passed from site to site too. Suddenly all the good link juice your site was receiving from your link building and baiting campaigns becomes reduced.
This could be more serious than any Google Florida or Caffeine update ...
So what is the plan?
I think from now on, not only do link building campaigns have to look for links with relevancy and page rank, but also now how that particular links page rank has been grown will need to be analysed. Bring on the link building indexing spiders!
Written by: Martin McAndrew