Google and the Long Tail of Online Publishing

The managing editor of The Wall St. Journal Online noted an article I had written 10 years and two jobs ago, having tracked me down via Google.

Now Chris Andersen, author of The Long Tail, notes that he now sees 39% of his traffic going to posts more than a month old.. Of that, only 12% doesn't come from search engines. Said another way, his archives of postings account for 27% of his traffic, courtesy of the long spidering arms of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

What does this mean for marketing? A few things:

• More content equals more traffic. Jakob Nielsen notes that with 10 years of archives, 80% of his 30 million pageviews has come from archived stories. Authors should recognize their archives as being significant assets and do whatever it takes to preserve them.
• The tyranny of too much is making getting noticed harder. Anyone authoring a new article or thought competes not only with other current ideas, but also with the billions of other pages already published on the Internet. Getting widely noticed is only going to get harder with time because of the long tail, a fact we observed a while ago thanks to some excellent research by Umair Haque.
• Personal and company brands are persistent and long-lived.. While the long tail is wonderful for Web site traffic, it also means that our online views and mistakes will live with us nearly indefinitely. Those who build strong and positive brands will benefit. Those who flip-flop, antagonize their readers, and generally serve their customers poorly will find it hard to recover. Internet brands will become more permanent than those in the real world because of the Google's immutable gaze.

Perhaps this is a time when one of the old saws of email netiquette rings particularly true "Never post anything you wouldn't want printed on the front page of the New York Times."

The only difference now is that your moment of infamy on the front page of the New York Times will last indefinitely -- or at least will when newspapers figure out that they should unlock their archives.