What the A.P. is Missing

I was just reading an article at Tech Crunch asking the question, Does Google  Really Control the News?  While the story was not directly related to my thesis, it pointed out something that I had missed in the whole A.P. content controversy.  We’ve argued that the A.P. benefits when bloggers quote and link to them because we send them more traffic.  That’s certainly true as far as it goes but it’s not the end of the story.

Search engine rankings are based in large part on how many inbound links exist to your site, article, story, etc.  Every link boosts your ranking even if only minimally.  Links from larger sites with more traffic are more beneficial but all links help you.  So every time a blogger links to an A.P. story, not only does that directly drive some traffic from the link, it also helps improve the search engine ranking for that story at the A.P.

If all of us stopped linking to any A.P. stories, the result would be significantly lower search engine ranking for the A.P., resulting in much lower total traffic for them.  My particular site might be small but my impact is larger than just the traffic sent directly from my site because I also impact search engine rankings.

We hold more power than any of us generally believes but only if we act in concert.  Individually we can do very little.  I’d be willing to bet, however, that the loss of all blog links would do significant damage to traffic to the A.P. and they’d be forced to rethink their position.

Also see:

• Once Again: The A.P. Says It’s Going To Sue Aggregators
• Boycott the A.P.!
• The Washington Times Copies the AP – Starts Charging Bloggers to Quote Them