NYTimes Journalist Uses SEO To Show Her Editorial Bias

I am not the first blogger to claim that the NYT has some questionable editorial practices, but the use of links in a recent article by Claire Cain Miller on the how Lifestyle Lift got busted for faking online reviews caught my eye.

The author presents two external links in the article, one to the NY Attorney General’s press release on the matter and the other to RealSelf.com, the site where Lifestyle Lift posted the fake reviews.  There also are three internal links to the Times’ Topic pages on Andrew Cuomo, Amazon.com & Yelp.com. These are the pages that the company uses to try and rank for search queries related to these subjects.

So how come there are zero links to Lifestyle Lift’s site?  The company is clearly the main subject of the piece and the providing the link would definitely help flesh out the story for readers. NYT.com does not tag their external links as “nofollow” therefore they are capable of passing a considerable amount of pagerank.

One, that one being me, can only conclude that the writer and/or the editor was making a judgement call to withhold providing Lifestyle Lift with any SEO benefit perhaps because they had been naughty.  Doesn’t seem very objective to me.