Encyclopædia Britannica’s SEO & Blogging Strategy

Shel Holtz reports on his work with Encyclopædia Britannica on the WebShare program. In return for registering with Encyclopædia Britannica, the company will enable registered online publishers, including bloggers and others, to link to articles within Encyclopædia Britannica that will be accessible from the publisher's website but not from the subscrition Encyclopædia Britannica website.

This is a fantastic idea; publishers will also gain free access to content for one year. During that time, publishers can link to content on Encyclopædia Britannica and their readers will also be able to access the subscription content.

Instead of just making all of Encyclopædia Britannica's content free, you either have to subscribe or find it on referenced websites. That gives value to publishers, and gets links for Encyclopædia Britannica. That's super because if Encyclopædia Britannica is going to compete with Wikipedia the company's articles will have to achieve top rankings in search engines. One of the top factors in getting rankings is links from other websites that includes keywords that an audience is searching on. So any article referenced in Encyclopædia Britannica, will likely receive a link from a page with keywords related to the article.

I believe Shel Holtz came up with the strategy, it shows a solid understanding of the dynamic of bloggers, we like to give value to our readers, and how the web works with search.

I’d be curious to hear from Shel what the search and SEO community think of this strategy?

Note: Shel & I are colleagues in the Society For New Communications Research, we are both volunteer fellows of the society, a nonprofit think tank on social media.

Here's an example of an article from EB.