We have had some confusion about the tightening of expectations around the use of Highlight so I wanted to take a few minutes to explain why it matters. Despite how it looks, using Highlight to reference sources does much more than just frame that text in a color block. By using either the Highlight tool or the manual code [q url="Source URL"]Quoted Text[/q] you identify the referenced material as a quote in a way that search engines clearly understand. This is beneficial to your story and to NowPublic as a whole.  

I know that SEO seems like mumbo jumbo to many people but there are some things that are proven realities when it comes to writing for the web. Before the Web 2.0 revolution mass syndication of content was appealing to writers who wanted to reach as many eyeballs as possible, but in the era of blogging and social media search engines need help identifying original articles. Why? Well think about it. If every time you searched in Google your results page showed you the very same article on 30 different sites you would probably get fed up and use a better engine that gave you choices. So to make sure users have choices search engines filter out copies, put them in omitted results (or ignore them altogether) and attempt to identify and display only the original.

When you use the Highlight tool or the manual code [q url="Source URL"]Quoted Text[/q] you tell search engines in a way that they understand that your article is only referencing something else, and not copying it entirely. The fact that the referenced material appears in a coded "frame" as opposed to a small "source" link at the end makes it very easy to see that your article is something new and not a mishmash of copied content.

This is why it is so important to use either the Highlight tool or the manual code. If you do not do this your story may not place in search engine results pages and you will not see much traffic. Whenever you are quoting another source you should use Highlight. Italics or bold text with a link at the end is not enough to let search engines know that this is not a copy from another source.

If you want to link to further reference material and are NOT quoting material the way you link still matters. Anchor text is very important to how your stories show up in search engine results and can help you place higher than other articles about the same subject. Anchor text is simply the text that you choose to make into a link. In code the anchor text is placed within the anchor tag like this: <a href="URL">This is anchor text</a> Good anchor text describes in words what you are linking to.

Raw urls (ex: http://domain.com/story-url.htm) is not good anchor text and does nothing to help your story rank well in search engines, in fact it can even hurt. Linking with generic words like "here", "source", "click this", "page", "article", "item page"... is not good either as it does nothing to let search engines know what the link SHOULD be about. The best anchor text is keyword rich and clearly describes what the link SHOULD be pointing to (ex: to link to NowPublic you would use the words NowPublic rather than, "this site" or http://www.nowpublic.com, as anchor text)

It is important to let search engines know what a link SHOULD be pointing to so that they can tell that you are intending to link to valuable information elsewhere on the web as opposed to just driving traffic to a different website or gaming keywords in their search results algorithms.

For more information see Keyword optimization in your anchor text

I know there is tons to digest here so feel free to ask me any questions you may have. I wanted to post this to dispel the myth that Highlight has no value and just looks "pretty" as well as to explain why some types of links hurt traffic to your story.