The Machines Have Eyes or How Google Is Changing Writing
The New York Times has an article today about newspaper websites being more tuned for search engines:
News organizations, by contrast, have moved cautiously. Mostly, they are making titles and headlines easier for search engines to find and fathom. 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.”
Some news sites offer two headlines. One headline, often on the first Web page, is clever, meant to attract human readers. Then, one click to a second Web page, a more quotidian, factual headline appears with the article itself. The popular BBC News Web site does this routinely on longer articles.
A need for news sites to change headlines and categories simply to improve Google ranking bothers me on some level. By using different labelling systems in print and online, the news service is showing a disregard for print subscribers that wish to take advantage of the web site as well. Beyond that, it is a need that quite often is simply not actually a need. If a news site has a category labeled “Real Estate,” Google should be able to equate that with “Homes.”
Google already already spends a good deal of time with any number of true news sites (meaning journalist or mainstream) with Google News. One would hope that, if your news site is being indexed within Google News, your labels are being equated with nonidentical, but synonymous labels. Google’s own stated goal is to index all information. If they are missing this piece, they need to do some programming.
All ranting aside, simply having a by-line to the category label that focuses down (a minor design decision) allows for the news service to serve each type of user in a consistent fashion without sacrificing pagerank. Perhaps that solution should have been considered before making an experience inconsistent.
(Via Tom Raferty’s I.T. Views)