But I must say, an ad buyer hardly strikes me as one best suited to be “clear-eyed about how journalists can best approach S.E.O.”

Its not that anything that Lorenzoni says about how (certain types of ad buyers) view (certain types of) traffic is wrong, but rather that it is a single-minded perspective on traffic, and really doesn’t provide much in the way of insight on SEO for news organizations at all. And, by the way, I’ve worked with large ad buyer for large sites before, so I’m familiar with their concerns about content association. That’s why I have the parenthetical asides – this would certainly be a concern for big brand campaigns, but not for network display traffic, and certainly not at all for AdSense and other automated text-based advertising.

Because search-driven traffic spikes can be “toxic” to (certain types of) advertisers, what’s the takeaway? Don’t try to drive mass numbers of users to your news sites? This hardly seems reasonable or helpful.

Let me briefly try to answer your question “is good journalism a good S.E.O. strategy”, as Lorenzoni largely didn’t.

Absolutely. The best content – in part to Lorenzoni’s point – receives the largest number of shares (including real-time social mentions that are increasingly important SEO signals for the search engines), the largest number organically-generated links, and the best user engagement in the form of comments and the like.

This is also the content likeliest to be a the top of a search in Google (in a news vertical) for keywords related to the topic. This includes “Lindsay Lohan” (high bounce), “Japan Earthquake” (Lorenzoni’s “toxic” association) and “new low-fat foods” (beloved of brand advertisers).

Modern digital media’s business models are still evolving, and in the mix are metrics concerning traffic volume, traffic sources, different types of advertising and different types of revenue models. That this business model should be focused on selling digital advertising to big brands is limiting, to say the least. Put another way, would a paper in 1968 stop reporting on the Vietnam War – or trying to attract subscriptions because of the excellence of their war reporting – because a Timex ad might appear near a war story?

Finally, I’ll just add in regard to “toxic” associations that semantic ad serving technology has come a long way to solving such undesired content associations. Indeed, smart ad serving not only helps avoid these situations, but in general are better for advertisers because display ads are related to the associated content, rather than to bulk buys. But just as newspapers are sometimes slow to adapt to technological changes, the ad industry hasn’t necessarily kept pace either, and bulk impression-based campaigns still generate a lot revenue for publishers – but I think this model will changes, or at least see a lot of other types of high-value advertising starting to be added to the mix.