Here’s an idea the Associated Press should’ve had long ago: use the collective link juice of the hundreds of publications to which it syndicates news to give AP owned pages a major boost in search engine rankings.
Apparently, the AP has finally figured out the potential of a system like this. The Nieman Journalism Lab reports that the organization plans “to build ‘news guide landing pages’ that will aggregate the AP’s content around subjects, places, organizations, and people.”
Those pages will then be linked to whenever a reference to them comes up on in AP article elsewhere. For example, if hundreds of papers run an AP story about Michael Jackson on their website, and link the keywords “Michael Jackson” to the AP’s landing page for the late singer, that landing page then has enormous power in Google and other search engines, likely making it one of the top results when anyone searches for “Michael Jackson.”
Nieman calls this a Wikipedia rival, since Wikipedia currently occupies so many of the top spots for topical searches. Mind you, there have been many other attempts to rival Wikipedia with similar concepts – Mahalo, Squidoo, and Google’s own Knol product come to mind – but none have had the built-in network of high PageRank sites that can link back to topic pages.