81–90 of 273 posts
Rather that than ditching google search completely which is getting closer every day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? Because I've already spent a lot of time on the content, to then just slap 'Lou's Wednesday Website Update' as a title? Because, historically, a title is an introduction to my writing? Any of…
Regarding one of these examples: How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer -> How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated ] even if the article content wasn't updated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? Because I've already spent a lot of time on the content, to then just slap 'Lou's Wednesday Website Update' as a title? Because, historically, a title is an introduction to my writing? Any of…
Regarding one of these examples: How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer -> How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated ] even if the article content wasn't updated.
> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
The problem there is that "optimizing for clickbaitness" means "making the titles as appealing to click on as possible when they're displayed in search pages". Google deliberately making them less appealing to click on means Google are reducing the effectiveness of organic search results, and that favors adverts instead.
In other words, what you are saying is that you believe it's valid for Google to rewrite website content to make search page adverts more appealing than the actual search results.
That is very hard to justify. If Google wanted to 'punish' sites for being too clickbaity then they should drop that site's position in the search rankings. Ranking it highly but rewriting the title to be something worse (or 'less clickbaity') is a massive abuse of their search market position to favor their ad business.
> Takeaway: to dramatically decrease the chance of Google rewriting your title, matching the H1 to the title tag seems to be an effective strategy. Of course it should be mentioned this wont last if it becomes popular. Historically every time an SEO trick gets popular, the rules are adjusted. Even having this article on the front page of HN might be enough to see Google react by rethinking how (or whether) tags in ti…
I wonder if Google is going to try out "AI"-generated titles that are directly summarized from the page content by machine, treating the page title and headings as inputs to the model.
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> Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically...
> If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically Isn’t this the intended effect?
I hate clickbait as much as the next user, but using that technique to get users to click appears to have even become part of the core business model of previously prestigious outlets.
Picking on the WaPo for no real reason:
How the Washington Post pulled off the hardest trick in journalism https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news...
An Open Letter to the Washington Post: Please Stop Doing Clickbait https://thedailybanter.com/2016/05/letter-to-the-washington-...
> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
Omelas, bye-bye (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)
Things are looking up (Great Expectations)
A crying cop (Flow, my tears, the policeman said)
The one that got away (The Old Man and The Sea)
on edit: I expect someone will point out those are the names of works of literary fiction not webpages, but obviously if we assume that webpages do not deserve the kind of respect we would give a creative work in book form and not change the title because it suits our needs, then we should not spend all our time complaining that the content of the web is just lousy stuff that nobody would care if you changed with an algorithm.
Why is HN editing self post titles?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding one of these examples: How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer -> How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated ] even if the article content wasn't updated.
Wouldn't it be better for the users to penalize the sites ranking instead hiding the fact that the result is your usual click bait drivel? Rewriting the titles just hides that the results Google found are low quality garbage.
I don't think about SEO, and just focus on useful writing / societal impact. However, I recently discovered by accident that I ended up with a top 2 search result for "platform democracy": https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy .
But the title is missing the first 3 words—including the key words "Platform Democracy" — so that if I was a random person aiming to learn about the concept, I would likely skip over the result! (I almost did even though I wrote the piece!) This seems not ideal for either users or Google, and also an interesting exploration of AI/NLP impacts, so I tried to dig a bit deeper.
I had a brief exchange with Danny Sullivan, Google's public @searchliaison on it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413) which linked to two guides from Google on this. Sadly neither were particularly helpful, but will share them here in case they are helpful to others:
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-...
(Also plausibly relevant: I have http://platformdemocracy.com/ redirect to the piece. I imagine this might impact search ranking, but I would be surprised if it impacts the title rewriting.)