BBC News: one headline, seven nouns
Headlines and Googleability
Just a short one. I’ve blogged before about Googleability vs. Creativity in print and web headlines, and how search engine optimisation is currently doing to the English language more or less what Doctor Beeching did for the railways 45 years ago. This is an interesting case in point.
Yesterday evening the BBC News website published a piece on the government’s evacuation plans for Britons stranded due to Iceland’s volcanic eruption. The title for the article, impressively enough, was
‘Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures.’ (visual)
Yes. That’s one headline with seven nouns, leaving BBC News journalists looking like they had been instructed to shoehorn as many keywords into the headline as possible. Is it really necessary? Do the BBC – who already have such strong web-presence and brand identity – need to pander to the search engines in this way?
Still, perhaps one of the subs realised that they had got carried away, for when I looked this morning they had changed the headline to ‘Volcano cloud Britons could return via ‘Spanish hub’ – almost equally ugly, but at least down to four nouns. (Which is plenty).
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Image credit: atibens
Original story via @Sarah_Bakewell
5 Responses to “BBC News: one headline, seven nouns”
BBC News: one headline, seven nouns: http://bit.ly/93b3CJ (via @Sarah_Bakewell)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Headlines and Googleability. BBC News: one headline, seven nouns: http://ow.ly/1ADXT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
It was probably more likely changed to coincide with search patterns; so not actually ‘fixing’ the problem, but evolving to generate more hits?
It’s just a guess, but more likely than them changing it because it had too many nouns.
One headline, seven nouns http://bit.ly/dcJFv0 (post by @petermoore)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
True. Posts are updated to react to varying search trends, but I don’t think that this was the case in this instance.
It had been spotted on Twitter, first by a literary blogger (God – that’s a new profession) and then by an author, who both commented on how odd it appeared. I’m guessing that someone at the BBC had the same reaction and asked for it to be changed – not just because it had too many nouns, but more because it sounded silly.
Still, I’ve no way to prove that and on its own it’s quite a trivial matter. Either way it’s a sad symptom of what over-zealous SEO can do to the English language.
Thanks for the comment.