The Guardian has reported an investigation which suggests that an employee of Sitelynx, a search marketing firm working for Time Online, has been engaging in some good old fashioned link spamming.

It suggests that Piotr Wyspianski has been ruthlessly promoting content from Times Online on sites such as social search engine Mahalo (which I’ve written about before), Yahoo! Answers as well as social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, StumbleUpon & Ma.gnolia. At this point in time it’s not been confirmed whether Times Online, or even Sitelynx, were aware ofWyspianski’s actions but if they were it means Times Online are actually missing a trick.

Jemima Kiss at The Guardian ends her piece by saying:

I suppose on the plus side you could say it is good that the importance of these sites is being recognised, and that old school news publishers are taking SEO seriously.

and to an extent, she has a point. If done with an understanding of the etiquette of such sites, and in a measured way, there is nothing inherently wrong with promoting a client’s content. The sad thing here is that it really ought to be the journalists at Times Online who do this promoting.

I’ve written before about the importance of 21st Century journalists grasping SEO it seems that many still don’t see it as part of their job description. But whereas in the world of print publishing a journalist can relax congratulate him/herself on a job well done as soon as the story hits the presses, online that’s just the start.

Because journalists, if they want to appeal to the users on sites such as del.icio.us & Digg, need to be thinking about what these people are likely to want and how they might find it. Just adding social bookmarking chicklets to the bottom of every article, as Times Online, the BBC &countless other publishers have done, is not enough.

In order to reach out to these communities the journalists should become active members, contributing & commenting - and not just on their own content. For example, the Tech Editor at Times Online could create a deli.icio.us profile & bookmark all the stories he or she finds interesting. In this way, as more & more people find content through this aggregation, many will come to rely on the journalists profile as the first place to go in order to get the best stories. In fact it’s worth mentioning that Jemima does just this herself.

And as I explained in a post over at SEOmoz yesterday, by becoming active members on these communities & on relevant blogs, they increase the chances of receiving the links that Piotr was so desperately spamming for.

The internet is changing the publishing industry, probably more than any sectors other than music & film/TV, and there are obviously a lot of new ideas that those working in it are having to deal with. But at the end of the day, those journalists that do embrace the new methods of distributing their own content, and accept that it is now part of their role, are likely to be the ones still working in 10 years time.

Obviously I should add that if anyone at Times Online, or any other publishing company, would like some help with helping their staff adjust to these changing times, they should definitely give us a call. And they can always refer to the series of blog posts I wrote last year explaining these issues in more detail.

UPDATE: Jemima has now posted a comment from Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of Times Online:

[Sitelynx] apologised straight away. [Piotr Wyspianski] was working on the Times account but not on link building, and he had no authority to do this. And we don’t do link spamming anyway.

Header image: Mulad on Flickr

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