NYTimes.com a victim of its own SEO success?
A few weeks ago, a friend commented that she was surprised to see that the Most Searched list on NYTimes.com included words like “sex” and “drugs” mixed in with more news-oriented search terms like “bush” and “obama.” In fact, “sex” was, and is, the top search term (and drilling down to Related Searches gets really nasty). We agreed that this sounded suspicious—could that many people really be coming to NYTimes to get their thrills? I opined that most of these searches likely weren’t coming from actual NYTimes readers, but were being funneled by search engines. Turns out I was right. The Times has apparently been engaging in a now-banned practice of “including search results in search results.” I’m not quite sure how NYTimes did this; I assume they either built SEO-specific pages based on thousands of queries, or included query links in their site map. Either way, now that the cat is out of the bag, it looks like the site is going to have to come clean. From having the top spot on the sex SERP a few weeks ago, NYTimes has now dropped completely off the radar. This means the term is likely to disappear from the Most Searched list pretty soon as well. And I suspect that NYTimes will be a better site for it.
