ON WRITING FOR HUMANS AND GOOGLE (GOOG)

MULTIPLE MASTERS

(Update:  John Battelle weighs in on the topic.)

The New York Times has a timely article titled "This Boring Headline is Written for Google", highlighting a reality that most web publishers large and small increasingly must deal with.  And that is:

"JOURNALISTS over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The search-engine "bots" that crawl the Web are increasingly influential, delivering 30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites. And traffic means readers and advertisers, at a time when the mainstream media is desperately trying to make a living on the Web."

The article could also be talking about far smaller publisher like bloggers...yours truly for example.

In fact, the headline of my last post is ungainly long and less readable for human readers, because of an experiment. 

I'm trying to see if putting in the stock tickers of the companies mentioned in that post, results in the post being displayed in the list of blog posts that comes up on individual tickers queried on Google Finance.

For the ugly headline, I apologize to my human readers, and ask for their indulgence with these experiments.

I've tried putting in tickers in the headlines of occasional posts over the last few weeks, and anecdotally there seems to be a correlation between their appearing on the Google blog lists and their placement in the top headline.  They don't seem to appear when the tickers are placed in the body of the post, which would obviously be a more aesthetically pleasing option for human readers.

The Times article has some similar examples of how two sets of headlines are needed in this new world:

"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..."

"Another (BBC) headline meant to lure the human reader: "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." One click down: "Obituary: Gene Pitney..."

"In the print version of The New York Times, an article last Tuesday on Florida beating U.C.L.A. for the men's college basketball championship carried a longish headline, with allusions to sports history: "It's Chemistry Over Pedigree as Gators Roll to First Title." On the Times Web site, whose staff has undergone some search-engine optimization training, the headline of the article was, "Gators Cap Run With First Title."

An obvious solution would be agreed upon indexing and tagging standards that would allow legitimate publishers, both large and small, to have their content indexed correctly on the various search engines.  An even more obvious problem with that obvious solution is that the global spamming industry would make any such "forthright" approach untenable within days if not minutes.

And the problem is even bigger since publishers are not just trying to please Google's crawlers, or even just the search engine companies' index crawlers, but an exploding number of companies that are fielding a wide array of filtering and presentation technologies.  Obvious examples here include "memetrackers" like Memeorandum, Digg and others.  Not to mention tag search companies like Technorati, Del.icio.us and others.

And just like search, these new types of aggregation sites are going increasingly vertical.  Memeorandum itself for example has four different services for content in the technology, political, entertainment and sports categories.

Multiply that with dozens of meme-trackers in hundreds of vertical categories, add that to a similar horizontal and vertical fragmentation for the regular search engines, and you start to see the beginning of the problem between publishers and the new gatekeepers.

It's not just about "search engine optimization", but "micro-chunked content optimization".

Over time, presumably, better technologies and services will emerge to make life easier for publishers large and small to get their content in front of the appropriate potential audiences.

In the meantime, we remain in this cat and mouse stage.  Trying to figure out how to shape our content for multiple masters.  And this is increasingly true whether you're a publishing whale on the web, or a minnow.

Comments

[Dominic Jones]

The day we start writing articles for search engines is the day we stop writing for our "readers". The problem is not with us humans, the problem is with the search engines.

[Rich Brooks]

Great article! However, if you're really trying to write for the search engines, you should put your best keywords at the front of the title. Thus, your earlier post should read:

(ELNK, GOOG, YHOO, TWX, MSFT) ON WHO ELSE BESIDES GOOGLE AND EARTHLINK ON MUNI WI-FI?

or...

(ELNK, GOOG, YHOO, TWX, MSFT) MUNI WI-FI: GOOGLE, EARTHLINK AND WHO ELSE?

Now, doesn't that read better? ;^)