How the NSA Scandal Will Change SEO and PPC Practices for Paid Content

For years, Google, Yahoo and Bing have been the dominant search engines because of consumer trust. But the recent NSA scandal may change all

For years, Google, Yahoo and Bing have been the dominant search engines because of consumer trust.But the recent NSA scandal may change all that. With the Big 3 giving access to the government agency, alternate search engines have seen a spike in traffic. One notable competitor is DuckDuckGo, which publishes its traffic stats. Note the exponential growth after the NSA story broke:

What does this mean for subscription sites and paid content?DuckDuckGo hooks into open-source resources like Wikipedia to rank sites — it does not require sites to have sitemaps or use other SEO best practices. Therefore, it’s harder to game the system (and on the consumer side, less junk results for searches).This means that paid content and subscription sites will need to rely more on keywords than sitemaps, alt tags or other SEO tactics. And like before, it’s hard to get paywalled content ranked.However, on the plus side, DuckDuckGo makes its money from sponsored links, so PPC campaigns (which are likely to be hindered through the Big 3 because of new FTC guidelines) can still be lucrative on sites like DuckDuckGo — especially since the site lets consumers report low-quality sponsored links. That means that information and news sites publishing quality information will be able to get better results for PPC campaigns to paid or premium content.While some marketers may be disappointed by the changing rules of SEO and PPC, a more clear separation of church and state between the two practices may actually benefit information and digital news publishers. Consumers will value un-gamed search results for content more, and view sponsored, relevant links for favorably, even if they’re for paid content.You can learn how to start a PPC campaign on DuckDuckGo here.

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