The limits of SEO

Do you remember Mohammed Emwazi? Maybe it doesn’t ring a bell. Do you remember “Jihadi John”, though? Emwazi, it seems, was much better known by his Isis sobriquet than his real name: a basic analysis on Google reveals 103,000 hits for the latter versus 403,000 for the former.

But we didn’t call him that at the Tribune. The foreign desk asked us not to. Perhaps a mention somewhere in the copy to clarify that Emwazi was indeed known by that nickname, but never in the headline or at the top of the story. The desk didn’t want to “trivialise a serious situation”, or add tabloid pizzazz to the torture and beheading of hostages. So we didn’t. We’d have got more clicks if we had, but we stopped.

The same applies to the “QAnon Shaman”, the “Yorkshire Ripper” and several others. “It means we sometimes take a hit on search,” the web production editor writes, “but we do it so as not to make light of the individuals and their motives/actions”.

A few weeks ago on Horny Handed Subs of Toil, a member revealed that his publication asks subs to allow “mens”, no apostrophe, in certain circumstances for search engine optimisation, because Google fails to return as many results if you type it correctly as “men’s”. There was consternation, as you might expect, and some doubt as to whether it was in fact necessary, but it illustrated the kind of discussion that we normally have about SEO. Who’s top of the search results? How can we get more traffic? Are we doing the right thing? It’s much rarer, but perhaps more revealing about your organisation, to consider the things you won’t say even when Google wants you to.

With us, the reasons vary. Our coverage of the subpostmasters and subpostmistresses scandal is probably being hampered by our disinclination to say “subpostmasters” or “subpostmistresses”; we won’t use one without the other for reasons of inclusivity, but using both makes headlines unfeasibly long. We are going with “post office operators”, which is probably not what people are typing into their search engines. We insist on “register office” – the correct term – not “registry office”, even though Google Ngrams suggests that the latter has almost always been more popular than the former (and produces significantly more hits in search). And we say Brexiter, not Brexiteer – despite a two-to-one swing against it on Google – simply out of a determination, as strong today as ever, “not to make them sound like jolly pirates”.

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‘I’ve got a great idea …’

…let’s do a mock-up of Harry Kane as Michael Caine for the front page! The Euro 2020 quarter-final’s in Rome, so it’s “The Italian Job”, get it? (OK, so The Italian Job was set in Turin, but close enough.)

However, there are deep undercurrents of British popular culture swirling here. Ostensibly, the visual references are indeed to the evergreen heist film – there are the England flags, the patriotic Minis and so on. But the “Harry” of Kane’s name, as well as his lugubrious expression and black-framed glasses, point to a character in a different film altogether – the laconic spy Harry Palmer in one of Caine’s early breakthroughs, The Ipcress File. Charlie Croker, the cheery criminal he plays in The Italian Job, hardly wears glasses at all. And the instantly familiar phrase on which the headline is based – “My name … is Michael Caine” – doesn’t come from a film at all, but from a song. It was a hit for Madness in 1984, with a voiceover by the great man himself, and a video that, again, draws on an Ipcress-ish aesthetic.

All of this probably got processed completely subconsciously by readers: you have to stop yourself to notice that you’re looking at a portmanteau joke comprising two cinematic genres and a pop lyric. And it also happens too quickly for you to remember that The Italian Job ends with the plucky Brits teetering on the brink of disaster and the prize slipping out of their reach. It’s a good thing that didn’t happen on Saturday.