The outcomes of science journalism are usually condensed in science magazines and science blogs, which are trustworthy sources of topics for both the public and the search engines, and it’s not surprising at all that we see pages from these sites in top positions in searches by any keyword. Moreover, the AI component of search engines scans and refers to these sites with priority, as they do with the academic literature.
These facts raise the question of whether any form of internal science journalism – that is, developing such content for your own site, with topics related to its niche – can be turned into an effective SEO method. The answer is yes, and in this article you will see what form of internal science journalism has proven effective as an SEO method and how such content should be managed and linked to grow your site’s authority, position, and traffic.
Science journalism and science writers
Science journalism is a media field and profession whose outcomes are a mix of reports and literature addressed to an audience who wants not only to get informed, but also to have some knowledge of facts and theories about the world, coming from science, philosophy, and technology. The pieces created by science journalists are usually condensed in specialized sites such as science magazines or science blogs, in the form of reports and summaries of new scientific findings, essays, or interviews with scientists. Science magazines are known for their rigorous editorial processing, and even though they do not peer review the submissions, they filter them by academic rigor and fact-checking. Science journalists are writers familiar with the academic field of the topics they write about. They rely on their expertise when reading scientific literature and interpreting it in their writings, which are well documented and referenced. Meanwhile, a special kind of literary talent is required for science journalists and writers to make their pieces comprehensible and pleasant reading for the non-expert audience, in terms of language, style, and conceptual argumentation beyond the scientific framework.
Credibility and trustworthiness based on credentials and site’s authority
One doesn’t have to be a university professor or even hold a PhD to write in a science magazine. Their editorial board takes the author’s idea and its basic arguments as the main criteria for acceptance of a pitch, usually paired with the author’s writing background. It’s more the post-acceptance editorial process, involving revisions and polishing, which signals to everybody (including search engines) the authority of the site and relevance of the content. In addition, such sites have their own internal crew of science journalists with strong credentials who write for them reports, news, interviews, and so on.
Google “likes” and trusts academic content, as it submits to their criteria of relevance, originality, trustworthiness, and usefulness. They did so before their last core updates and even more so now. Google searches return in high positions content from the authoritative academic channels, whatever the keyword. Their AI-search overview also trusts the academic zone, which is scanned most frequently.
After the last Google Core Updates (GCU), the user’s experience came into the spotlight as a new important criterion in Google’s algorithms. Since journal articles are not a reading for everybody, the content coming from science journalism made a big step ahead from a SEO perspective. Today Google treats the popular-science content almost like the academic content with respect to returning in searches and referencing, in both their main search engine and the AI-search overview. But this authority and position of science magazines comes not only from content and credentials, but also from the strong backlinks profile of such sites, signaling Google as a trustworthy source, per the old link-based ranking approach.
How about creating a science-journalism section on your site?
The SEO value of the popular-science content and the success of the science magazines and science blogs raise the question of whether any site adopting such content would have SEO gains, that is, whether science journalism can be turned into an effective SEO method in general.
For the manager of a site in a niche other than science/academia, any prospect of developing a science journalism section for SEO reasons raises these first quick questions: 1) What topics will we/I write about? 2) Who will write them? 3) Will the outcome worth the effort?
Let’s take them one at a time. Academic literature is so wide that almost any subject related to facts or theories about the world or beyond was or is an object of scientific investigation and hence gets directly or indirectly connected to a topic of a journal article. The academic literature can provide plenty of interesting, useful topics for the expert content of a website in whatever niche, if adapted for the popular audience in a broader context.
If your site sells shoes, you don’t have to be worried that there is nothing to write about shoes from a scientific perspective – there is certainly something, coming from various fields in academic disciplines (for instance, psychology, economy, biomechanics, medicine, and so on).
Obviously you will need an expert writer for such content, able to understand and interpret the academic topic, while adapting it for your audience and adding a context specific to your site. Someone from your staff may be appropriate for certain topics, but a science writer or even an academic is recommended for this job in most cases. Finding a writer by recruiting may sound like an easy task, given the market, but there is the option of having the writer doing also the off-page SEO job associated with your project, as you will see further.
“Content is king”, but only when driven on the highway
So will slapping a science-oriented article related to your niche on your humble site just explode your ranking for related keywords? Obviously no, as there are other more authoritative sites treating the same topic – science magazines, for instance. Fortunately, this is also not the answer to question 3 in the previous section. Having such content posted is worth the effort, but only in conjunction with the right off-SEO strategy.
The winning move is to find a way to connect your article with the original journal article that it discusses, so that the latter will drag yours up in Google searches, by sharing its SEO value. Such a connection is possible only by a two-step citation process, where a third-party editable publication is involved. The method is called Citation-Based Academic Link Building (CBALB) and was developed and tested by the academic team of PhilScience. It connects the non-academic content of a website with an academic publication in a way that is natural and useful for both publications and their readers.
How Citation-Based Academic Link Building works
This method exploits the fact that academics publish their research output not only in journals, but also on other academic channels, for a wider dissemination. These channels include science repositories, academic archives, research data repositories, science blogs, and university resources, which are highly authoritative sites from a SEO perspective, granting researchers and academics access for contribution. The researchers deposit on such sites versions of their published research and also reports, presentations, data, scholarship resources and other academic materials. While a journal article is no longer editable after publication on the publisher’s site, the materials published on these dissemination channels are editable after publication by their submitters and all have reference lists where journal articles are cited per the academic standard.
If together with the submitter you manage to link such a reference to your article as a ‘summary’ or ‘related article’, you will get a contextual backlink from that academic site to yours, which serves the readers of the former and as such is useful from Google’s perspective. Such linking closes a natural connection between the three publications: your article, the journal article (cited in your article), and the third-party publication (citing both the other two). Since the editable publication is submitted by its author(s) to many such resources (for a wider dissemination), you can manage to have your citation-link in all of them, which will drive SEO authority to your page proportionally.
The result of this citation-based form of science journalism will be that the new content on your site will go – if certain conditions are met – in tandem in searches with that of the journal article that it discusses or summarizes, which ranks high. This association, along with all the academic links acquired, also makes your article eligible as a resource for the Google’s AI-search component.
Who will do all the stuff?
The good thing is that you don’t have to recruit writers and search for academics to convince them to incorporate your citation-links in their publications, which – let’s face it – would be a very difficult task. The PhilScience team is dedicated to offering the CBALB to sites in any niche, covering the entire job from assisting with topics, writing the articles, finding the suitable publications for your citation-links, and incorporating them. They collaborate with academics from many academic areas for giving the CBALB a wide coverage with respect to topics and publications.
In conclusion, internal science journalism based on citation-based academic link building is a powerful SEO tool with proven results, applicable to any niche and responding perfectly to the last GCU. You don’t have to be any great SEO expert to implement it for your site or to reach out for the needed collaborators, as there is a dedicated team of academics carrying out this service in a professional manner.
In terms of effectiveness of one site’s SEO strategy, it is better to take a few big steps guaranteeing results instead of getting bogged down in large-volume, chaotic SEO or traditional methods (most of them outdated and even harmful).
To find more about how the CBALB works in detail and all its virtues, read the article https://www.magazine.philscience.org/2025/01/17/citation-based-academic-link-building/
To contact the PhilScience team offering CBALB, go to https://www.philscience.org/pages/cbalb.html .