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New York Times Accuses Huffington Post of Using SEO to Manipulate Readers

The New York Times has reported that 35% of the Huffington Posts hits in January came via search engines. While this would usually not be a remarkable statistic, the NYT has gone on to accuse the Huffington Post of purposefully targetting SEO through their news stories, giving priority to those that have high keyword usage.

They argue that the Huffington Post managed to increase its net worth using these tactics, increasing both readership and advertising revenue, at the expense of quality journalism.

They also claim the amount of hits from search engines, like Google, is remarkable as CNN only achieves around 20% of hits from search engines. This, of course, ignores the fact that CNN has a much higher brand awareness that the Huffington Post and, as such, will be able to draw in far higher volumes of direct traffic.