Richard Nazarewicz is the Technical SEO Manager at the Wall Street Journal and I was actually suppose to visit him over a year ago, before COVID hit, at the WSJ offices but then COVID happened. Instead, we both got vaccinated and then met in my office, since his office is not fully open right now. We still were socially distant because we are good at not being social. We spoke a bit about the transition to working from home and things around that.
Nazarewicz is an old time geek, he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), he did servers and storage and had some AltaVista servers in the corner, yes, AltaVista was created by DEC in 1995. Compaq acquired DEC, and Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He eventually left HP to start his own agency in Spain, doing search marketing, site development, web apps and so much more back in the early 2000s. He did that for a few years or so and then moved to the United States and worked at some agencies there and eventually took a job at the Wall Street Journal after a recruiter reached out to him.
When he joined the Wall Street Journal there were bones of an SEO team there and he and his team built out an impressive internal SEO team. He said management really bought into SEO and that helped big time with growth. He also said they had their own flavor of a paywall but then when Google launched Flexible Sampling, the a Wall Street Journal switched to that solution and that was big for them.
Approaching Tech SEO for a Global News Organization like Wall Street Journal:
Early on, Richard built a schematic to see how all the data points, how it all interacts with Google, how it results in traffic and so much more. A lot of it was also standardizing the stack, the technology stack, even from using the same 404 across all pages. The WSJ even has many WordPress sites on subdomains of the wsj.com, so he manages that as well. So the company still does manage multiple technology stacks now. Richard then described the structure of the SEO team at the Wall Street Journal.
You can learn more about Richard Nazarewicz on Twitter @richardnaz.
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