Has the Guardian Finally Gone Bonkers?

A very interesting article was brought to my attention over the weekend which was published on the Guardian website in June. It passed me by the first time around and on the surface looks like a normal football rumours page. But, look a little closer and the content appears very obscure, even funny, but what if there are more sinister undertones?

The Guardian may have been ridiculed for its frequent typographical errors in its printed newspaper, but owns without question an “authority” website, boasting a PR9 homepage, 553,000 indexed pages and 15,600 backlinks in Google.

This is why the following article, Paris Hilton to Manchester United, warrants some closer attention.

Perhaps author of the article, Tom Lutz, has read up a little on search engine optimisation tactics and wanted to show off a little of his new-found knowledge, or perhaps he fancied conducting a little on-page optimisation experiment on one of the UK’s most powerful websites?

The (admittedly longtail) search phrased “how to make vast sums of money without working for a living” ranks between positions four and five in Google for the phrase and I’d bet my Joe Calzaghe v Roy Jones Jnr tickets they have got at least a trickle of traffic from it.

If a website of such global standing as The Guardian can rank well for popular phrases such as “Paris Hilton”, “Manchester United” and “Make Money Online” merely by inserting the phrases into articles then the rest of us could be in trouble. The above article is written rather tongue-in-cheek, with a smattering of unrelated keywords in the article, but what if such websites took things a step further and created keyword-rich and linkable articles based around one hot topic, niche or person?

Have you noticed recently how many articles from the UK-broadsheets, e.g. The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph are hitting the front page of Digg? The journalists writing for these newspapers and their subsequent websites are writing content which attracts thousands of readers and gathers links along the way. Plus, they have enough online clout to make a big splash on the social media websites to make pretty much anything they churn out an instant hit.

The internet is getting more corporate, with a lot of large organisations starting to “get it” when it comes to online marketing and soon the search engines could be a closed shop for the rest of us industry professionals who make a living by assisting the little guys to compete with some of the bigger players online.