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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."'"
Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....
.eu domains, many of which are going to be those article-wiki type affiliate marketing sites and search engines are already crawling them. Sorry guys, but the days of putting up hundreds of pages of content and waiting for Google to do your marketing are gone.
.. nobody is going to find you.
We don't do that anymore. Just like companies that hope to market their news agencies have got to stop depending on search engines to reel in traffic. The sites that attract visitors through searches and make revenue by serving ads are established and have consumed the available market share.
To be successful doing what they do, one of them has to go under right around the time you have something similar already seeding in search engines. Its quite a long waiting list folks.
If you want to reach a niche news market you need to hit people during rush hour in their cars with radio advertisements, or find another way of luring them to your site and when they arrive your titles had better not be crafted for Google.
Look at the explosion of over a million
Don't re-write the titles, take the hint that what you're doing just isn't working. Either change your marketing strategy or re-evaluate the fiscal sanity of continuing to publish.
Insanity is doing the same thing over, and over and over again yet expecting different results. The market is flooded - get creative in your advertising and MORE creative with your content and you may enjoy some success. Otherwise the sad fact is
Go take a look at shitlance and search for "need articles, need articles re-written, SEO content author". Trying to succeed doing what they're doing is like punching yourself in the nuts until you pass out.
Completely *wrong* direction, imho.
Personally, I can think of nothing that would improve newspapers more than getting rid of those idiotic puns often seen in headlines...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
"Some formulation of the hard disk law has been around long before the SciAm article"
Yes, and that law was called Moore's Law. I think the role of an encyclopedia is to document, not invent.
but did you change the wikipedia entry to reflect that? :-) Thanks for pointing it out, I'm headed there now. Mind if I link you on the talk page?
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? Computers don't always have an easy time digesting data a human would find simple to understand, and vice-versa. Shouldn't that generally be acknowledged by design? (Disclaimer: I don't do much work with web design. If you do and you know why this hasn't been done or won't work, please let me know.)
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I thought the boring, machine-readable stuff (i.e., not just headlines) was supposed to be in metadata. No need to do a hatchet job on a descriptive or witty title. Of course, I just may be an old codger in Internet time.
What's more, I thought the whole point of Pagerank was to make your page associated with what others think your page is about... that if your obituary about Gene Pitney is entitled "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." it'll show up in a search for Gene Pitney because (hopefully) that string will be indexed from the page body and that as other people associate your page with Pitney — irrespective of the <title> that obituary will float towards the top. And if they use your witty title, not only will you get more popular for "Gene Pitney", but also "Tulsa Star" as well.
But there are unwashed masses that do use other search engines, but I thought the last people to rely absolutely on metadata were Alta Vista and WebCrawler.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
the author didn't seem to consider the possibility that readers prefer this..
i personally would rather actually know what articles are about based on their headlines, than be tricked into reading something by a misleading headline. most headlines aren't "creative", so much as they are "dishonest" in the newspaper.
i skim through my university's paper every other week, and i usually am reminded why i don't read it more often.
-- lol pwned
This is really only tangentially about search engines. It's really about people finding things by searching, rather than by browsing, today.
It used to be a potential reader would be standing in front of a magazine stand, or leafing idly through a newspaper. To grab that reader, a witty, slightly hard-to-understand headline was great - it catches your attention and makes you at least look closer since you want to know what that mysterious piece is actually about. And thus you made the single-copy sale, and perhaps, in time, sold a subrscription.
Today we increasingly don't start by picking up a paper and looking within for what we want; we find things by searching for what we want and end up on anyone of a large number of newspapers and magazine sites. The choice of paper isn't the start of the process - the search is. And when we search, that witty off-color headline is going to mislead us since it doesn't actually contain the key terms that would indicate relevance. Making headlines and summaries clear, straight and to the point isn't about pandering to search engines, but of adjusting to the changing behavior of the readership.
It's the reader behavior that has changed. The search engine angle is just a smokescreen.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Obvious solution: use images to display the witty section names (scene) and alt text and hidden span text displaying the boring name (lifestyle). With a little work, the same could be applied to headlines.
Why shift content off screen when you can just tell it to not display it with your CSS? that's one of those things people do that I can't really see the point of (shifting, not hiding). Is there a benefit to only shifting it?
Be warned that you need to block your stylesheets from being crawled though if you try to hide text from users with CSS because search engines can mistake (or be correct in some cases) that as spamming and kill your search placement because of it.
It's a handy way to put more keywords in pages that users might not want to see. So you can put "Scene [Lifestyle]" and only have the user see the word "Scene" so you are actually helping people find you. Something I do is include common differences in how to write part numbers in that kind of hidden text. On my site the users can search and find stuff by that hidden text but they won't see it because it'd be confussing to them. I go ahead and include it in the page source though so that people searching on Google, Yahoo, etc can also find those pages. Pretty much what the keywords meta tag probably should be used for but isn't since search engine spammers devalued those tags.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Newspapers should focus on the news. Unfortunately, ours are trying to provide entertainment, sensationalism, titillation, thrills, and witticisms. Lets hope that, after the gimmicky double-entendre headlines are gone, we can also get rid of these other misfeatures of journalism. And, yes, the NYT is one of the biggest offenders.
There is an even better method for keeping witty headlines *and* be ranked in top position with google : pr0n. Here are some sample headlines :
- UN concerned about Iraq and free hentai
- Pope Benedict XVI replaces John Paul II in bondage
- France strikers and Natalie Portman arrested
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Search Engine optimisation is a contradiction in term
How come does anybody, not to speak of web designers, get the stupid idea that one has to optimise ones website for search engines anyway? Isn't that totally backwards? I should optimise my website for *users* and their expierience and the general webstandards. If the search engine is to stupid to find content on my site that is relative to a search, then it certainly isn't my job to optimise for them. That's the job of search engines themselves. That's where the name comes from.
Guess why Altavista missed out when Google appeared. The had the more optimised search engine.
I allways thought (and still think) that so-called webdesigners that offer their customers 'search engine optimisation' (whatever that's supposed to be) to be the used-car sales and multilevel marketing lot of IT field. Some shady semi-professionals offering some non-product. Whenever I'm finished building a Web CMS Site for customers I take the time to feed the URL into the searchbots so they do the first scan of the site more quickly, but that's it. If anyone comes to me bickering about the bad search results a searchengine comes up with I usually tell them that if the searchengine sucks, they should use a different one. It's that simple, really.
Bottom line:
If you're doing *anything* on the web, forget about search engines and just build a good site. If your site is good and the search engine is good, both will find each other fast. All else is just bogus.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...anyone should be able to read a headline and quickly get an idea of what the story's about. Much better to have some snarky news editor misleading us to get us to read their stupid story.
I, for one, welcome "boring, straightforward" news headlines. After all, it's news. Not commentary, not opinion. If I see a newspaper section marked "Scene" I'm not likely to know what it's about.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
As citizens of this democracy, workers in this nation, and technologist hobbyists, it's hard for all of us to find time to read anything from start to finish. So they're right on that point: the headline is often all you really get out of news. Funny thing is, I know lots of people who are more interested in Matt Drudge's headlines than the NYTimes headlines. He writes better headlines than the NYTimes. They're more timely, more revelent, and often more witty.
Stick that in your Google and search it.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Having said that, this boring headline business doesn't seem to have affected The Register. They usually have some clever ones.
planet texture maps and more
The Sydney Morning Herald has not only replaced its old-style "meaningless without context" headings with "boring" ones, but it's stuck them into its URLs - which is another SEO idea.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Xserv
"I love lamp."
Certainly not, I'm taking about the specific case here: Headlines for google.
This stuff makes perfect sense for local newspapers, where 90% of the audience can be assumed to be native, and to know what's going on in that specific area. But online is a different world, where content is equally available to everybody.
Also, things like RSS allow very quick scanning of headlines without seeing pictures or text, which almost guarantees that many people will ignore something they don't get at first glance. Reducing your audience in this way seems counterproductive.
They're, IMO, just different worlds. In a newspaper you try to get some extra audience by getting people interested, trying to get a reaction of "that's clever", or "wonder what is it about". Online you have vast amounts of people that are actively searching and filtering information, looking for something specific. You'll get them by being direct and to the point.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I think I'll really miss all the completely lame and useless "witty" headlines from news papers. Reading the exquisitely cliched headlines in the newspapers used to give me the motivation to hit myself in the head with a hammer repeatedly in the morning. Now where am I going to find that motivation?
I keep reading and hearing that news agencies have issue with search engines such as Google, and are threatening legal action because of sites like Google News for getting a "free ride" on news items which they are merely linking to and not doing the "hard work" for uncovering the story. Now I read they try to make it easier for Google to index their stories??? Did I understanding this article correctly or am I missing something?