Sunday Business Post Paywall – I Love It

It is somewhat amusing, and disappointing, to watch one of Ireland’s media companies shoot themselves in the foot when it come to their online presence.  In fact as far as traffic and SEO goes this is more like a belly shot that the Sunday Business Post can either recover from or more likely go terminal.

Firstly I Love Paywalls

I love them most when they are not implemented correctly, like the Sunday Business Post.  Paywalls in the media should have a sneak peek function, this means that all the content is still indexed by Google and the first paragraph is shown to the reader, or whatever amount you wish.  This enables the media outlet to find many more readers than it would without this function – for example currently the Sunday Business Post has less than 100 pages indexed by Google.  If it had several thousand it has much more bait in the search engines for its product – namely subscription and advertising.

The reason why I love paywalls so much is that I also run a few websites that are content heavy and earn revenue from advertising.  Every time a media outlet disappears behind a paywall and doesn’t use sneak peek I celebrate.

Other Sunday Business Post SEO Problems

The above issue however is only the tip of the massive iceberg for SBP, it looks like their site has been designed to keep Google from giving them any free traffic, as if they only want traffic that is looking for them by typing in Sunday Business Post.

I started this post with the intention of talking about the paywall and simple SEO mistakes that can be seen from a quick glance at the Sunday Business Post website, however once I started to dig into the site a bit I quickly discovered it is a mess – I would not be surprised if their targets for the sites are way off.

These are just some of the problems:

• sbpost.ie – this is set as a 302 redirect.  A 302 is a temporary redirect, it tells Google that we will be using this domain name again soon.  Essentially it keeps this domain alive in the search results and does not pass the strength of the old domain to the new domain.
• The website uses JavaScript as the main way to delivery content – this means it is hiding all the content from Google – this is unbelievable for any website, esp one that could be considered content heavy.  This is like telling Google to feck off and don’t give us any traffic – madness.
• Even if the above was not a problem, the basics like titles and descriptions are missing, so for the less than 100 pages that have managed to get into the Google index, most of them don’t have a proper page titles and show only Sunday Business Post as the title – one quick look at Google webmaster tools would point this out – they do have it setup along with Google analytics – which must make disappointing reading.
• What is going on with the robots.txt file?  The sitemap leads to other site maps with huge lists of urls that are not accessible.

This website would have got more traffic running on WordPress with amember or some such plugin that would have collect the fees for premium content and allowed a sneak peek, then just add a different CSS file for mobile content.

I feel a bit down to see this type of implementation, often I just feel annoyance when I review some sites – but this is so terminal for a paper that is losing readership and needs to make an impact somewhere, additionally I like reading it sometimes.

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