Well, yes and no. A local community magazine will now publish its last edition in November!
The SEO boat has sailed. While SEO and Google no longer play the same games, there is still vast potential in having your articles online. But for this magazine… it seems that boat has sailed. I asked the publisher and editor to consider an online presence that included their articles nearly 8 years ago before Google had given up its soul to the devil.
The call fell on deaf ears. I don’t know why it took so long to get around to publishing their articles online. They finally did but… it was lacklustre, poorly executed and uninspiring. And still is. I wish it hadn’t been that way but… here is what I see now.
They hosted them on their own server until 2011 as PDFs. Then the PDFs were hosted online at Issuu for a very long time. It wasn’t perfect as a host, but at least they were indexed. Finally, they came back to hosting them on the server. The entire first and second archives of PDFs were nixed. But the PDFs are always to read on a big monitor and wouldn’t expand beyond preset dimensions.
I honestly am not surprised at the results of these missteps. But it’s a real pity. It’s hard to replicate that kind of community knowledge and sharing without making a major commitment of time AND skill. Nixing the magazine is probably even more of a poor decision. But the magazine revenue seems to be drying up and no major sources for replacement of that income are visible right now.