The Weekly Bulletin | January 30, 2024

Catch up on your members' content, check out the community buzz, and browse through job opportunities

Author

Vahe Arabian
January 30, 2024

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

Overusing tags is one of the most common problems publishers face in crawl budget management issues and an ill-informed site architecture.

The research on "Fewer Tags" addresses the misuse of tags in WordPress publications. It identifies three primary issues:

  • excessive use of tags,

  • tags not being displayed on websites, and

  • tag pages lacking descriptions.

The study analyzed 30 WordPress sites, including mom blogs, news blogs, and various publications. Key findings include a high prevalence of sites using too many tags, many of which only link to a single post, and a lack of tag visibility on about one-third of the sites. The research proposes solutions like using fewer tags, ensuring their visibility, and creating engaging introductions for tag pages.

What we also recommend is using a well-managed taxonomy system that can not only help your users navigate your website but also support your SEO strategy. You can create this based on the topic – based on a hierarchical, network, flat and faceted navigation or based on user interests.

Whatever you decide, stay consistent and keep your tags in order.

NEW SPEAKERS: WP WEEK

WP Week

In the last edition of the newsletter, we announced our first educational event of the year – WP Publisher Success Week.

Well, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve added quite a few presenters, including:

  • Barry Pollard – Web Performance Developer Advocate on Google Chrome, Google

  • Angelo Paura – Global Editorial Director, Blasting News

  • Aslam Multani – CTO and Co-founder, Multidots

  • Pete Pachal – Founder, The Media Copilot

  • Liam Andrew – Chief Product Officer, The Texas Tribune

  • Stephanie Solomon – Chief Revenue Officer, Foreign Affairs Magazine

  • Anil Gupta – CEO and Co-founder, Multidots

Register for the entire event or for individual sessions.

SODP REPORTS

What’s in Store for Publishers in 2024

If you were not able to join us for PubTech2023 in November, check out the summary of key learnings.

Local Publisher Content Strategies in Australia

This report examines the strategies used by small-scale publishers to grow their businesses.

JOB BOARD

➡️ Harvard Public Health, a magazine of impact journalism for public health, is seeking a creative, motivated, and versatile senior editor to join its team of journalists (Hybrid, Boston, MA, US). SEE MORE

➡️ Red Ventures is seeking experienced Senior SEO Associates to help drive growth through its organic strategy (Hybrid, Charlotte, NC / NYC, NY, US). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Technology publisher TechCrunch plans to wind down its paid subscription product, TC+, editor in chief Connie Loizos told staff. READ MORE

➡️ Games are helping the New York Times thrive amid media chaos. The New York Times' puzzle and games were played more than 8 billion times last year, led by breakout hit Wordle, with 4.8 billion plays. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Niall Cullen on LinkedIn:

🚀 Automate Search Intent Analysis using a SERP API and GPT-4 in Google Sheets (FREE Template) 👇

It's been a minute since I've shared any custom tools here, but I'm excited to share a project I started last weekend. After recently getting back into Google Apps Script, I've put together a Google Sheets template that combines a low-cost SERP API (100 free searches with a free account) and the GPT-4 API to help programmatically summarise the search intent of search queries based on the current state of the SERPs.

This Google Sheet template works by programmatically fetching and analysing the live search results, looking at SERP features and organic listings, to provide:

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP