3 Macca Vs. Paul McCartney
In his article “Search over style” Will Cooper from the New Media Age (an online magazine about New Media and Marketing) writes:
“Newspapers are a great illustration of the way search is changing established business practices.
The Times, for example, employs a search editor, while other titles that are fully integrated, such as The Daily Telegraph, recognise that optimising for search engines is imperative for bringing in new readers.
A feature in this week’s NMA explains the problems that tabloids are currently facing, as their headlines, puntastic as they might be, aren’t exactly Google or Yahoo! friendly.
The Sun, for example, will almost always refer to Paul McCartney as ‘Macca’, but most people will search for ‘McCartney’, therefore the broadsheets, which nine times out of ten won’t abbreviate his name for their copy, would be more likely to appear high in the search results.
So if they’re not going to be picked up prominently in natural search results, will tabloids change their style guides to suit the search engines?
Highly unlikely, so what then comes in to play is good use of paid search” (Cooper, 2008)
Let’s investigate this topic. In this article I’ll be arguing that the claim by Cooper is not entirely correct. To prove this, I will first examine the way newspapers, as opposed to tabloids, construct their headlines – in this case examples come from TimesOnline and The Sun. Later, I will explain how search engines work (based on Google): processes of web crawling, PageRanking, and indexing are actually not as complicated as they might sound to lay-people. Based on this information I will arrive at my conclusion that tabloids do not need to be terrified by the picture painted by Cooper.
