It’s rather clear from many studies and even from simple observations that the The Huffington Post Seo Strategy is to essentially be a giant blackhat SEO autoblog. 98% of what the Huffington Post publishes is simply aggregated, regurgitated and SEO optimized for their own benefit.
While there is nothing illegal per-say about what they are doing, it is rather underhanded.
There is a great article on the Monday Note (http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/07/08/transfer-of-value/) about the old newspaper conglomerate giants vs the new world. In essence, the old newspaper model is going the way of the dinosaurs; what they need to do is learn to adapt to the ever-changing online world and deal with it. But that’s not what interested me, nor is that the subject of this post. What’s super interesting is the business model and the true and tried strategies you should be applying to your own business.
Putting your own spin on a news article isn’t anything new, so what the Huffington Post does is what we as internet marketers and local businesses are doing, except on a much larger scale. So what do they do that gives them 16,000 comments per article? The Huffington Post Seo Strategy is simple:
- Tract all current trends on Google
- Tract all major and not-so-major-but-still-popular news stories online
- When an article matches up with a current trend:
- Optimize it for those keywords, change things around for LinkBait (making the title look very juicy to readers)
- Post a very short snippet from the original article
- Add a few ideas and words for their own
- Profit
Of course, they also link back to the original source.
Now that’s what I call one heck of an efficient business model. What’s better though and what makes it super interesting is the part about the content A/B split testing they do:
The A/B testing was custom built. We do not, however, A/B test every headline. We often use it to see if our readers are familiar with a person’s name (i.e. John Barrasso vs GOP Senator), or to play up two different aspects of a story and see which one interests readers more. We also A/B test different images. — Whitney Snyder, HuffPost’s senior news editor
So like any good larger site, they test, split test and find the best converting article. From the story: when they test a headline, they only need to test it for about 5 minutes. Within that time they have enough traffic and results to see what is working and what is not.
The moral of the story: it’s ok to use some blackhat SEO techniques, link bait is good as long as you provide some quality/value and you NEED to be split testing your content.
