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)

Scoble talks about plentyoffish.com.

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

Huh?

He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

I wonder if it really is the poorly designed sites, or the sites that are designed to be quick and simple.  As far as I would understand it, simple and quick would generally win.  People don’t want to go to a site often that takes minutes to load (an irony this guy with a splash image on his front page does accept), but do the want to go to one that has clashing colors, poor text choices, and other design mistakes.

Web design should follow a number of different paths: visually appealing, quick loading, and easy to use.  Each of these is important.  A look at plentyoffish shows that the site is not truly ugly; it looks amateurish but acceptable.   Another important detail is the fact that it is a free dating site.  Those generally have good traffic despite quirks.  I would love his eyeballs and revenue on some of my work, but I’m fairly sure it is not due to any amazingly good poor design decisions.

It’s due to having a service people want at the right price.