1. The New York Times is trying to game the search engines by front-loading its meta page titles. However, this creates problems for users who want to bookmark NYT pages.

It is never a good thing to design a website or webpage for anyone other than your end user. Search engines should adapt to what works for humans, not the other way around.

Posted at 3:47PM on Apr 9th 2006 by Dominic Jones

2. Dominic, I think you make a good point. If readers click through the link behind Dominic's name above you can read his post on this topic. It's a good one. The primary example he gives is of the Time's title tags, which place the publication name after the article title. Dominic contends that this is counter intuitive for social bookmarking purposes - where the source is more likely to be remembered and thus sought for reference later than the particular title of the article.

I think he's right about that - and it's a good example of design for bots versus design for users and later reuse. Perhaps, though, social bookmarking services ought to have a text field for the source of a bookmarked item - not just the URL field.

Posted at 3:53PM on Apr 9th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

3. I don't understand Dominic's point. What's wrong with writing for both a human reader and a search engine?

Posted at 12:39AM on Apr 10th 2006 by WebMetricsGuru