A media giant's SEO challenge » YugaTech | Philippines Tech News & Reviews

Now that we’re witnessing the final phase of the transition from Inq7.net to GMANews.tv and Inquirer.net, both will be facing some setbacks as they move along and away from each other. I’m sure a new layout will unfold over at Inq7.net which will divide the real estate space equally between the two media entities.

inquirer

I look at it as an SEO challenge and here are some pretty obvious ones:

Inq7.net is PR7 while Inquirer.net is PR0. They’ll probably catch up later.
Inq7.net has 256,000 pages indexed by Google while Inquirer.net only has 33,000. That means a lot less traffic from organic search.
Alexa ranking of Inq7.net is 3,911 while Inquirer.net is 16,492. My blog has an Alexa rank of 17,993 so you can only imagine how low the ~~traffic~~ ranking went down.
From Yahoo Site Explorer, Inq7.net has 262,771 backlinks while Inquirer.net has 35,847. Direct link referral traffic would have also suffered.

If you check Alexa, you’d see that their reach has gone down by almost half by December in the last 6 months:

That dip in the curve on the first week of December was the time when they experimented with the domain transition. GMANews.tv has their own regular Adsense account and while Inquirer.net still looks like they’re a Premium Adsense Publisher, only time will tell if that 44 Millions a month will hold. (Note: To be a Premium Publisher, you must have at least 20M pageviews a month)

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10 Comments

joseph · 19 years ago

Hmmm…. yesterday inq7.net redirects to inquirer.net.

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 19 years ago

@ joey

Ahh yes, I missed that one. Should be rankings instead of traffic. It should pick up later though.

About the traffic, I’d like to refer to the Alexa graph above in terms of “reach per million”. Inq7.net peaked at 600 in mid July then slid down to just over 200 by the end of December.

Miguel · 19 years ago

Also, Alexa numbers are said to be worse than useless (in blogs I’ve read about a month ago) because they give you meaningless info.

How many people you know have installed the Alexa toolbar on MSIE? I haven’t seen any.

Mike Abundo · 19 years ago

On a smaller scale, Level Up lost its entire Ragnarok forum after outsourcing it to Yehey.

Let this be an object lesson to online media practitioners everywhere: do a long-term cost-benefit analysis before making possibly unnecessary partnerships. Don’t be so quick to partner up for something just because you’re too lazy to learn it yourself.

joey alarilla · 19 years ago

hi abe, thanks for the post and yup, you’re right, there will be some challenges. it’s a transition, but we’re confident we can overcome the obstacles.

i’d just like to point out though that the inquirer.net alexa ranking of 16,492 doesn’t mean our traffic went down — it’s the average for 3 months, and we’re sort of coming from nowhere when it comes to the inquirer.net domain. what’s interesting to note is that according to the alexa traffic details, inquirer.net is up 291,324 in the rankings for the past 3 months. it’s too early to tell, of course, but the 1 week average traffic ranking is 5,446 and for today we’re 5,331, so let’s see if we can keep this up in the next few months :)

cheers,
joey