The Fortune Cookie Chronicles


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    Maybe they think “fortune cookie” is a euphenism for mysteries of the Chinese orient?

    By Jennifer 8. Lee | October 19, 2007

    Ever since this post about my friend Adam’s first successful case on prosecuting a pedophile, I have noticed a lot of people landing at my site because of their search for “chinese porn” or “porn chinese.” (I wonder if these guys think “fortune cookie” really means “in bed”). Fortune Cookie Chronicles, as of this today, is actually on page 2 of the Google results, after xxxchinesegirl and chinesef…cker.

    The reasons, by the way, that my blog post ranks so high despite the lack of any skin on the site, is that 1) blogs are weighted very heavily in search engines because of their freshness, 2) words in the URL are heavily weighted in search engines, and 3) blogs often use the title of the post in the URL.

    Since newspapers are getting into SEO (search engine optimiziation), this becomes an interesting issue for headline writers, because a clever headline, by newspaper standards, is not one that uses obvious words. They come from the side, pay smart inferences, and plays. For example, this fantastic headline “And if it’s a Boy, Will it be Lleh? for my article about the popularity of the girl’s name Nevaeh (“heaven spelled backwards), doesn’t use the word “baby names” or “heaven.”

    Newspapers are struggling with this since an increasingly share of growth is coming from search engines. So sometimes articles have two different headlines — one for the search engines, one for the page. There are now newspaper classes on how to write headlines for search engines.

    Topics: Blogging Musings, Chinese Food | No Comments »

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