Noticed a story on BoingBoing of the curious case of Thomas Crampton, a Reporter who wrote a scathing comment of a recent structural change on the New York Times Website titled - Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career
Thomas Crampton, formerly of the International Herald Tribune, sez, "The NYT committed most boneheaded move by a web team since the dawn of the Internet: In merging the International Herald Tribune and New York Times sites, the brilliant New York Times web team deleted all links to every IHT story along with the newspaper's archives. In other words, they erased my journalism career online. Anyone following one of the thousands of links from over the years to a specific IHT story is now directed to a generic home page. Full horror detailed in posting on my blog."
Actually, the story was first reported 6 weeks ago, at the end of March, by BlogStorm, care of Gawker - International Herald Tribune removes all pages from Google
The International Herald Tribune (owned by the New York Times) has decided to change from iht.com to http://global.nytimes.com/.
Truth is, according to Compete.com the visits to iht.com were almost inconsequential to the New York Times traffic volume with only 133,495 average monthly visits vs the New York Times' 58,278,327.
As if that wasn't a bad enough move they are redirecting all 988,000 of the pages on the iht.com site to http://nytimes.com/marketing/iht/. That means they lose all the long tail traffic they get from search engines not to mention people clicking on the hundreds of thousands of links they probably have.
From my point of view a business decision made with out fully understanding all the consequences, can yield results like this one, especially when the Web is involved. According to Google - the numbers in the chart below represent .....
The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals.
See http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22Thomas%20Crampton%22&date=1%2F2009%2012m&cmpt=q to update the chart above.
I've been arguing, mostly to deaf ears, especially of late, that SEO, Web Analytics and Social Media have Merged - but the full implication of that goes even further than I mentioned - it means every business decision should also be implemented in a way that does not impact Web Presence in a negative way, and this change with IHT + NYT web site, did.
To be fair to the New York Times Web Teams, who are probably overworked and demoralized by their longer work hours, pay cutbacks and layoffs, which seem to be happening, more and more, everywhere - there might not be much incentive to have researched what would happen when this change was made.
I'll even go one step further and say there may have been no way to know, for sure, what would happen in Search Engines when this change (a simple redirect to the NYT homepage) would do, and it's also fair to say that in time, maybe the listings of Thomas Crampton and other IHT Reporters will reappear - it's happened before.
And while everything is "immortal" now - everything you put up on the web is something that others can see, sooner or later, the paradox is that "history can be quickly erased" - with a slip of the hand, an unforseen consequence - which the New York Times change certainly was.
Problem is, there aren't too many people out there that could have predicted, in full, what would happen -there's so much misunderstanding and mystery about how Google and Other Search Engines crawl, that even with all the tools (ie: Google Webmaster Tools - which should have alerted the Web Team early on of the issues with what they did) it's difficult to know what the SEO effect is going to be from some "infrastructure" change that is initiated by a "business decision".
This is all the more reason that teams need to be merged, as I've proposed - again, on deaf ears - people seem to think Web Analytics, Search Marketing, Social Media, and IT Infrastructure are separate costs centers - with separate goals, separate management, and that it is almost inevitable, in larger companies, for this to be the case.
But I'll argue, this decision, to separate Analytics, SEO/SEM, Social Media, PR Communications, is wrong - especially for large companies - because SEO, Web Analytics and Social Media have Merged as far as the the Web Channel in concerned, and these things can not be well managed, any longer, in silos. That's just a fact, there's no argument of it - it is what it is.
Why? Most of the business is now done on the Web Channel - therefore, all of these functions should merged into one team (perhaps a few teams under one strategy group) - with web strategists that can handle all of them at one time.
Oh, by the way, I know Digital Agencies are organized to be much closer to this paradigm than in house teams, but I'm talking about in house, not agencies - unless you want to create an "in house" agency and make it it's own cost center. I'm not against that - in fact, it probably makes more sense than anything else I've heard.
That's where I belong.
I can not imagine the New York Times planned to intentionally erase International H erald Tribune's stories - all of them, and according to thomascrampton :
They killed the IHT and erased the archives.
1- Every one of the links ever made to IHT stories now points back to the generic NY Times global front page.
2- Even when I go to the NY Times global page, I cannot find my articles. In other words, my entire journalistic career at the IHT - from war zones to SARS wards - has been erased.
On a personal level I am horrified that I can no longer see all my stories. The IHT logo on this blog used to link to a search of the IHT website for my articles. On a professional level, I am appaled that the NY Times would kill all the links back to the IHT website. Imagine the power of combining two sites with a Google rank of 9 instead of killing one.
Also, imagine all the frustrated potential readers who click on a link to a specific story only to find themselves landing on the generic NY Times global front page.
The only way readers can find the IHT stories is by going to places where they were copied and reposted or Google cache. Is that a good for readers (or shareholders)?
This clearly "wasn't the intention" - but what does that say about business strategy? How well informed was it, really?
Was the Business Strategy aware what would happen when the redirect was put in place - was it done in the right way?
No, I bet it was no one's job to really know - or maybe it was some one in the SEO team, someone that left, or someone that just didn't know what would happen. Or maybe some people did know, and could not get a word in to the management team - it would not be the first time such things happen - they happen all the time.
To be honest with you - the whole thing might have come down to this .... http://global.nytimes.com/?iht
Maybe ... what they did here was stupid mistake that had the unintended consequence of wiping out all of Thomas Crampton's articles - but that's all the more reason to integrate SEO, Web Analytics and Social Media, as they have Merged
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