Dear Rolling Stone:

Whomever is in charge of your web site is completely unaware of something that’s been around for at least a decade. It’s called search engine optimization. Some people call it SEO for short. More or less it is the art and science of making sure that your site appears in the search engines and does so when people do certain searches.

There are a few basic things to SEO that you should be mindful of that I’ll quickly cover for you.

1. Links are really important. This little company Google, I know they aren’t in the music industry so perhaps you haven’t heard of them either, but they have this search engine that about 3/4th of people in the United States use. You should check it out. It’s located at Google.com. Put that in your address bar. It’s the box that has the http:// in it. Just put it in there. I’d link to it . . . but that may be too advanced yet. Anyway, they determined in the late 90s that the internet should be treated sort of like term papers in college. Except they use links instead of citations as ‘votes’ for what content is popular, authoritative and relevant. Why does this matter to you? Well, because you used to have 3.2 million of them going to your site. Which will soon be gone as you have killed every page on your site and have up a ‘coming soon’ page. BIG mistake. Lots of ‘votes’ you just flushed.

See above the number of links you have going to your site, Rolling Stone.

2. Relevancy is really important. Google and the other search engines are also really worried about making sure they provide their users web pages that match their query. So they look at web pages and which pages are linking to other pages and they determine relationships and relevancy based on those links. Now that all of links on the internet go to just your homepage . . . that’s a serious problem for you, Rolling Stone. Why? Well, because sites that used to be about say ‘Barack Obama’ that were linking to the Rolling Stone Barack Obama page . . . yeah, well that page has nothing to do about Barack Obama now because YOU REDIRECTED IT TO YOUR HOMEPAGE!!! Poof . . . good bye relevancy.

3. Google really likes authority. Meaning that like sites that have a lot of links going to them from places that have a lot of links going to them. To be more clear . . . they think you are more important because you have links from places like DrudgeReport.com. But do you really think the owners and webmasters of DrudgeReport.com or Real.com or Fark.com or . . . or . . . or . . . are going to keep their links up that go to you now that you have a ‘coming soon page’? I think you probably should’ve considered a development site. Launched on the development site and then perhaps switched over. I don’t know though. People on the internet have only been doing that for about 15 years or so. Still not completely tried and true yet.

4. Popularity . . . well I sort of already covered this but it’s really important so let me underscore it again. YOU HAD 3 MILLION LINKS GOING TO YOUR SITE!!! What the hell was your tech team, marketing team and executives thinking? You’re Rolling Stone for Christ’s sake. Surely you guys have some type of understanding of the web. Please? Please. Maybe?

5. Do you think you can get all of your audience back from Twitter and Facebook? Umm. It’s a small (but growing) portion of the pie. That really smart dude you listened to in that one corporate meeting that told you that all you need is a Facebook and Twitter profile and all will be just fine . . . yeah, umm, he may not have been the smart dude afterall. It’s a component . . . not the end all be all.

Now . . . this can be saved. But you need to act very, very quickly. You need to turn your site back on. God I hope you made a backup of it. Bring it back to exactly how it was a few hours ago. Then . . . and this is the important part. You contact an SEO. I’d be happy to help. But if you think I am too much of an ass (which perhaps I am, as the level of stupidity here is . . . ummm, it leaves me speechless), then please find someone. Even a bad SEO will know what to do to help you in this case. So anyone that says they are an SEO will be better than what you have now. If you want someone decent though. Let me know and I’ll happily give you a few dozen names.

Thanks for reminding all of us in the SEO industry that companies like you still exists. It gives us hope of continued job security for decades to come.

And . . . thanks for listening.

Brent D. Payne
SEO Consultant and SEO Director for Tribune
bpayne@gmail.com
312.324.3344

Note: Opinions are mine and mine alone. They do not reflect any other associations I may have with clients, friends, relatives or employers.

P.S. This was completely unedited. Sorry for typos or grammatical errors.