National Geographic's Thursday coverage of Groundhog Day was surprisingly extensive.  While it covered all of the news aspects of Groundhog Day 2012, it also went heavily into the history of Groundhog Day and the origins of the tradition, something that the readers of National Geographic definitely appreciate.

A photo with a link to the story was the first photo on the main carousel of NatGeo's home page.  Perhaps as a result, it was the most viewed story on February 2. 

Nationalgeographic.com homepage

Clicking on the picture leads to the main story

Groundhog Day 2012: Punxsutawney Phil's Forecast Is In

"Immortal" rodent says six more weeks of winter, according to handlers.

The body of the story is loaded with outside links to groundhog.org (the official Groundhog Day website), punxsutawneyspirit.com (the hometown newspaper), and ncdc.noaa.org (National Climate Data Center).  However, most of the links are to other parts of the National Geographic website.  Also notice that the links don't have a hover feature that would allow you to see where the link is going before you click on it.  In other words, if you want to see where the link goes, you have to click it.  That probably pumps up the number of hits each section of Nationalgeographic.com gets daily (as NatGeo readers tend to be curious and want to know everything), and its just from this one story.  The links open in the same window, so every time you click a link, you have the hit "back" to get back to the original story, which is kind of annoying.  At the same time, I kept clicking the links, so I guess it wasn't that much of a deterrent.  Inside links include the page for the groundhog on animals.nationalgeographic.com, a map of Punxsutawney, PA on maps.nationalgeographic.com, links to previously written stories, to videos, and to photo galleries. There is also a link to set a National Geographic photo of a groundhog as your wallpaper.




The link to the photogallery redirects you to news.nationalgeographic.com.  The photo carousel has 8 photos (none of which are actual National Geographic photos), and underneath each photo is an excerpt from the main story, plus some additional info that you didn't get from the main story.  One of the photos is actually attributed to Your Shot, which is a section of the website where readers can upload their own photos, which could potentially be published in National Geographic Magazine.

Overall, a great article with excellent integration of other parts of nationalgeographic.com.