Monday, March 21, 2011

New York Times Gives Value to Blog Links despite going behind Paywall


It is a bit ironic to note that New York Times is going inside paywall from next week but is going to keep links from Blogs outside of the paywall. For example, if we link any story of the newspaper from this blog and a visitor clicks and visits the NYT website for that story then the visitor will have access to it. Martin Nisenholtz of NYT stated it in an interview with Peter Kafka.
Here is the relevant part of that interview:
Peter Kafka: Just to be clear, when the Times says non-subscribers can read stories above their 20-per-month limit if they come from referring links, you’re not just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but any link from any site, right?
Martin Nisenholtz: That’s correct.
Kafka: It could be the Journal. It could be a blog, it could be the Financial Times, anything on the Web, right?
Nisenholtz: Yes. The only other thing is that Google has a methodology where they can limit the number of inbound links per day, and we intend to take them up on it.

If you are wondering why NYT suddenly became so generous with bloggers, Twitter and Facebook users then I can assure that the reason behind it is plain and simple. We feel that NYT is doing it basically for two reasons. First of all, if Bloggers like us see that our readers cannot get access to that article directly then many of us would not bother to link it. Then, NYT website will lose many potential visitors.
The second reason is more related to SEO. If bloggers do no link NYT reports then the NYT website will lose its importance to search engines. 

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