If everyone obeyed rules, though, we would have no need for police officers or pin numbers. Excess abounds in SEO’s shiny-new-toy phase, from the binge notion that if some is good, more is better, to downright premeditated abuse, sometimes called “black-hat” SEO. The New York Times recently ran a story about dubious business practices at an online eyeglass boutique, whose owner flatly stated that he welcomed negative online reviews from disgruntled customers because even bad news helped to drive his site to the top of the charts, SEO-wise. His big mistake seems to have been that he allegedly threatened a customer who complained, which optimized a police search: eight days later the man was charged with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats, and cyberstalking.
There are no equivalent penalties for journalists, at least not for the SEO maneuvering part, though both Benkoil and Monti say that Googlebot and the humans at Google who monitor bot behavior will sniff out manipulators and punish them by dropping their rankings. For journalists, the challenge is to avoid seductive excess—to stick with the Google guidelines and not change every noun to a word that performs better. It’s not an easy discipline. Shearer clicked when he saw a tweet with the headline, “Photographing Julian Assange,” only to find what he called a “stupid video” of a photographer trying to find the man behind WikiLeaks prior to his arrest.
Benkoil bristles at that kind of gaming, and at Weingarten’s tongue-in-cheek Lady Gaga headline—at any attempt to grab a reader with what he thinks are misleading SEO tactics. “What you’re talking about is a bait and switch,” he said. “If somebody’s searching for Lady Gaga and they click on this Washington Post story, are they going to be happy or ticked off?
“The classic old New York Post headline, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” he continues. “If I click on that page and there’s a story about something other than a headless body in a topless bar, I’m going to be pissed off.” Monti agrees: “If lying is your professional strategy it’s time to look for another job.”
Weingarten is not interested in an SEO etiquette lesson. As far as he’s concerned, the online Lady Gaga headline isn’t a lie but a call to action. (The headline in the print version, where SEO holds no sway, was the search-worthless but sly, “A Digital Salute to Online Journalism.”)
Weingarten’s larger fear is that chasing the algorithm will erase the creativity that distinguishes us from the Googlebot. “We’ll all start talking literally, like SEO headlines. Subtlety will disappear forever. Sterility will be our lingua franca, even among lovers. Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy,” he said, referring to the lengthy SEO-averse passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, about her thoughts while making love, “would become this: ‘Yes, I do believe I am experiencing an orgasm. Why yes, I am. And I am enjoying it.’”
Anjali Mullany, the social-media manager for the New York Daily News, has a contrasting and rather blunt perspective on the good old days, which is that they weren’t as different, or as good, as we might think.
“This is not a new debate,” she said. “Big news organizations have always been concerned with circulation, ratings, viewership. They’ve always made decisions based on what is going to make them money. That said, the audience has infinite choices on the Internet. If you’re concerned about traffic, you should also value publishing high-quality content on your website. I suppose that includes headlines that are both smart and SEO-conscious.
“As long as websites depend on traffic-driven advertising revenue in order to sustain themselves, and as long as Google and other search engines continue to drive traffic to media websites, SEO will continue to be emphasized.”
Shearer hopes that we end up with a two-tiered system, a digital version of The Associated Press breaking-news stories, on the one hand, and longer features that don’t engage in SEO-ery, on the other. And he’s reluctant to join in the machine-bashing: in the great chicken-and-egg debate about web user habits, Shearer thinks that user attention spans are what drive search-friendly journalism, not the other way around.
"The one thing they seem to agree on is that, for better or worse, the era of the clever headline and an above-the-fold mentality is over. Puns and double entendre and the significance of the far left-hand column on the first page have been consigned to the dustbin of journalistic history, as out of date as even the 1974 remake of The Front Page."
This is an absolutely ridiculous statement, and the people forwarding this notion have no idea how modern content management systems work or how pages are put together. Yes, SEO is important online and in a mobile setting but it should have no impact on the printed paper or likely even a tablet edition. There is a BIG difference between the online headline and the print/tablet headline. The sooner everyone whining about SEO realizes this, the better off we all will be.
#1 Posted by Mitch, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 10:06 AM
The principle is the same for both print and online headlines: clarity over cleverness. Print readers don't want to waste time trying to figure out what the hed means any more than online readers do.
#2 Posted by Hunter George, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 11:16 AM
Frankly, I don't see what are we talking about here. Of course in the old print world headline writing was not only an intellectual effort. "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR", or its competitor's "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD", were not only meant to summarize what was in the story, but also a way to get people attention to the issue, and sell some additional copies.
Editors could write nice/grabbing but false headlines then as now. If we talk about cheating the system, and cheating the reader, we could do that in print as well as online. What prevents us from doing it is not the medium, is the ethics -- and business too (once you have cheated your reader he's not bound to come back, and your advertiser would not be happy either).
As a young journalist I was taught headline writing by good editors. The idea was to choose a few words that describe content and get people to read it. If people read via Google - and they largely do - we should strive to get through it to have their attention, and SEO journalism is not only about headline writing, it is - for instance - also about "tag writing" -- which is: choosing a few words that describe contente and get people do read. Not only today, as news is made and told, but tomorrow, next year, offering today's story as an element of a story to come .
#3 Posted by Mario Tedeschini-Lalli, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 02:03 PM
Thoughtful piece, Karin. Thanks to the Internet, among the good and the not-so-good is the fact that more and more we are awash in data, text and images. I spend more time filtering OUT than bringing in. When I need timely and accurate breaking news updates on a particular subject I Google the subject then click on "news" where I find timely stories on the subject from (often unexpected) news services around the globe.
#4 Posted by Baron Wolman, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 04:32 PM
When I was in "J" school in the 1950s we were taught that 26 words was the outter limit of sentence length. Now we are down to 17 words. What if those 17 words contain more than 140 characters?
#5 Posted by Larry Levine, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 05:35 PM
i'm a web editor, we take great care putting stories in the top left column of our homepage because that's where the traffic is drawn to. Above the fold is over, it's called Above the Scroll and it matters.
God I hate Internet Hyperbole from people who dont work on the subject they're 'expertly reporting on'
#6 Posted by wrong, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 05:49 PM
A "resistor' is a computer component. A 'resister' is someone who stands up against one-size-fits all SEO nuts. Ms. Stabiner, in her misspelling, perhaps gives away her underlying argument. Humanity and creativity out, Algorithms and banality in. The Huffington Post sale touted here, along with the Demand Media IPO are examples of digital hubris that is just a Google tweak away from having millions of dollars go "poof". Those who live by the code may die by the code. Meanwhile, last time I looked, that above the fold creative headline was generating a lot more advertising dollars than the venture capital Monopoly money being thrown around in Bubble 2.0.
#7 Posted by Gary Warner, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 08:29 PM
SEO went from soft sell to hard sell to outright scamming, and is now a big part of why it's becoming harder and harder to find what you're looking for via Google and the other search engines. The "content" in all these so called content farms is at a high school copy/paste/reword level at best and absolute rubbish at worst. The quality of mainstream media reporting has steadily deteriorated enough without all this other junk filler material popping up all over the place while researching online, and there is nothing "equalizing" about churning out the written equivalent of music-on-hold.
#8 Posted by CallMeBC, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 11:50 PM
@CallMeBC but who is monetizing all the garbage content? Most of the time the answer is Google.
#9 Posted by aaron wall, CJR on Sat 5 Mar 2011 at 09:30 AM
I am a journalist of more than 20 years' active experience and have crossed over, successfully, into SEO and Social Marketing. Statements such as "Weingarten’s larger fear is that chasing the algorithm will erase the creativity that distinguishes us from the Googlebot." have as much resonance with me as 'The moon is made out of cheese'. I suppose Weingarten also considers those who write music scores for films to an extremely rigid time slot, where they have to create a sense of 'excitement', 'fear', or 'suspense' are not real musicians. After all they write music to order in a tightly confined start and end timed space. How can creativity thrive, right?
What every journalist really really wants is readers. The web offers an unparalleled opportunity to get more than ever if we knew just how to attract them. A working knowledge of SEO (and for journalists it comes down to just a few practical tips) is just that. To see it as anything else is hubris.
#10 Posted by David Amerland, CJR on Thu 10 Mar 2011 at 02:51 PM
This just in, from the man from Cisco:
http://tinyurl.com/4rprjeo
#11 Posted by billy james, CJR on Fri 11 Mar 2011 at 11:26 PM
Talk about chicken and egg!! Switch it to people and machine!! Which came first? Of course you know unless you are under 6 years old.
People read 17 word sentence better than 25 word sentences partly because that's what they are used to. When a business or a school teacher leans to the lowest common denominator to gain the best response, then the other 75-90% of the group learns nothing. That information to the lowest denominator has already been learned by them. Either they will then go elsewhere for information or remain ignorant.
The American public never did understand much of the use of puns or double entendres in their humor. Look at Mark Twain --mid 1880's. He used a lot of them BUT he always included slapstick humor. (so did Shakespeare!!) I taught Huck Finn to 8th graders and they did fine in understanding the basic plot of Huck and Jim but the history references went over their heads but they got the slapstick even by themselves--since most jokes aren't funny if they must be explained.
When I did the same at a different school at high school level those same puns were much better understood as puns and slap stick humor. They were also studying American History at the same time but under a different teacher.
Since most high schools slant toward the lowest common denominator, Johnny and Susie of all colors often never learn the humor in puns since their reading abilities are about 4-5th grade from 4th grade through high school graduation. There are always a few and the better schools can sometimes have a greater percentage that read and analyze at a higher rate.
But college professors are noticing not only that many students that come as freshmen read at low levels and have very poor critical thinking skills, but that those same students when they graduate from college haven't improved those skills much. Too much is spoon-fed them in high school and they expect and get the same pablum in college.
Reading materials sold and taught from must be required to make the students learn a broader vocabulary and a better use of longer more formal sentence constructions. They also need more questions asked them in writing assignments to do an analysis of what was written, not an evaluation of what they did or did not like about it. They evaluated the writing read in the first few paragraphs or pages so when that question comes up they can write endlessly. BUT they still didn't learn about what the ideas were and how they apply to the time in which they were written or apply them to today's.
Look at Lewis Laphams essay in Harper's April issue about Mark Twain, his autobiography and its application to the 21 Century's "gilded age." That's more what our college students should be writing about, not how they like or dislike Mark Twain's 737 page book of tidbits about human nature. It's not what they like but what do they learn!!!
PS Sorry if some of my sentences were more than 17 words. That's what I read and how I was taught a few decades back!!
#12 Posted by Patricia, CJR on Wed 16 Mar 2011 at 04:16 PM
Re: "Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy,” he said, referring to the lengthy SEO-averse passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, about her thoughts while making love,"
Actually, Leopold Bloom's missus isn't making love while the soliloquy streams through her consciousness. She's drifting off to sleep.
#13 Posted by Mike Boehm, CJR on Sat 18 Jun 2011 at 01:16 AM