What Would Google Do – the Publisher Version

A few years ago there were some trendy blog posts entitled “What Would Google Do?” The concept was obvious: Google was starting to make boatloads of money and there was a lot of healthy debate as to whether or not others should copy them.

That being said, most of the articles at the time focused on Google’s simplistic design and not on Google’s role as an information publisher, which is where current critical thinking about Google is focused. So, three years later, I find myself asking, “What would Google do?” again, but not as a designer: as a publisher.

Twice this week with two different publishers, I found myself asking this question.

Publisher #1 was the most perplexing to me. In this case, the publisher was concerned about their digital edition (one property) stealing traffic from their website (another property). Their proposed solution was to take their digital edition and bury it deeper within their website. They also planned on not linking to the digital edition from blogs or forums on the website, too.

They did, however, plan on sending e-mails to subscribers with a link to the digital edition.

And I asked myself, “What would Google do?”

Would Google make it more difficult to find what you were looking for? After all, if Google puts the best content on page four, wouldn’t that mean that people would scroll through three pages (with ads!) to find the good stuff?

Would Google send a batch e-mail out to thousands of readers instead of putting the content where they could find it when they wanted it?

In short, would Google make it more difficult to find the good stuff?

Of course not. Google knows that if you can’t find what you’re looking for, it doesn’t help Google and it doesn’t help the reader.

Publisher #2 was a more common scenario and one I hear more often.

In this case, the publisher was talking about competitive content. While they recognized that their competitors published good content, and would even quote it and cite it on their site, they wanted to stop short of linking to it, because that would only drive traffic off of their site and onto the site of their competitor.

Again, I asked myself, “What would Google do?”

Would Google display great results from a Yahoo article and omit the link?

What if Google only displayed textual summaries but had no links?

If they did that, would you use Google?

More importantly, since we know Google doesn’t do that, when you click on a link and leave Google and the information you’re seeking is what you were hoping to find, does that make you more or less likely to come back to Google?

This post isn’t to suggest Google is perfect. Far from it. But there’s a very important message here. Google understands that the best thing to do is to make it as easy as possible for users to find the content they’re looking for, regardless of where it is or where it makes traffic go. In doing so, they build loyalty, which should be the goal of any publisher, in any medium.

Next time, just ask yourself, “What would Google do?”