This Boring Headline is Written for Google

prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running an article on how newspapers around the country find their Web sites more dependent on search engines than before. The unexpected effect? Witty double entendres, allusions and sarcastic remarks are rewritten into boring straight-to-the-point headlines that rank higher on search engines and news-specific search engines. From the article: 'About a year ago, The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."'"

Comments

This is a good thing

[matt21811]

Witty or sensational headlines don't just deceive search engines.
Human readers can get fooled just as easily. Heres an example:

I was doing research to show that Kryder's Law (a kind of super Moore's Law for hard disks that says bit densities have increased factor of 1000 in 10.5 years meaning a doubling every 13 months) is no longer being achieved by hard drive manufacturers. Instead I discovered that Kryders Law was just a creation of Wikipedia's overenthusiastic editors that misinterpreted a single Scientific American headline. Wikipedia editors accidentally invented the "law", and it isn't even correct.

You can read about it at my site here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/Kryder's.html

The search engines are dong us all a favor getting rid of this problem.

Google will blacklist you for that.

[YesIAmAScript]

That's in essence what happened to BMW.

Google doesn't like you presenting different data to their search engine than the user would find if they visited. And I can easily see why. Sites would abuse the heck out of it.

See this link amongst many.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4685750.stm

Direct, Content Relevant Headlines Are Good

[Soong]

(notice my to-the-point headline)

Really, not only is it good for search engines, it's good for my brain's relevance filter for trying to see if I care about the story the headline points to.

Re:Two headlines?

[Anthony Boyd]

Would it be that hard to develop a standard (perhaps much like meta-tagging), giving one set of data easily digestible by the bots (and not displayed to the human reader), while retaining an entertaining writing style for human consumption?

That won't ever happen (or more precisely, if it ever happens, it will fail). The problem is that we've done that before with the meta tags you mentioned. See what the SEO world has to say about them (summary: they're nearly useless now). Here's the deal. Any time you create a system for someone to deliver one thing to search engines and another thing to humans, what happens is a small group of opportunists will create massively spammy porn pages for human viewing, while making the search-engine content about every popular topic under the sun. You'll see a headline-made-for-Google which reads, "Britney Spears on Will and Grace" but when you click it, the headline-for-humans reads, "3 lesbian midgets have a pee party!"