Google ... Put a Stop to 'Keyword News'
Let me first come clean, I've written stories prompted by Google Trends and also recommended these be written -- but there comes a point when your entire news operation is a Google keyword sausage factory that you're not really serving your audience or any audience for that matter.
Are you tired yet of "news sites" that turn daily search keywords into link bait? Are you fed up with sites luring unsuspecting users to stories that tell them nothing more than, "Congratulations, you just Googled this search term. Sit back while we serve you a dozen Google Ad Sense tags."
Take the mistress of Sen. John Ensign -- Cindy Hampton. The Google search term "Cindy Hampton Pics" ranks as a top search term because people are curious about what she looks like. Got it, that makes sense.
But trends.google.com ranks a story titled "Cynthia Hampton Picture: Cynthia Hampton John Ensign" from thespreadit.com as the No.1 result. Not only does it not have a picture of Cindy Hampton, but it barely has two sentences on the topic.
But my favorite result though is from a straight Google search of "Cindy Hampton Pictures." Welcome to the wealth of information in the No.1 ranked result from toppayingideas.com. These guys provide the following details:
"Looking for Cindy Hampton pictures? We have searched all over the Web for pictures of the woman who had an affair with Senator John Ensign with no luck. However there are some updates on the news of the affair."
If you'd like more on this, see the link back to the story you're already reading. Real nice.
Look, news sites should be monitoring any indicator they can find, be it Google, Bing, Twitter, etc. to track the latest topics people are buzzing about -- but search engines need to do a better job of filtering out this keyword bait-and-switch garbage, or at the very least adjust the rankings so your users are delivered relevant results at the top.
These sites are gaming your system, which mean users and legitimate news sites/blogs are suffering because of it.
