Just noticed something odd on the Sydney Morning Herald website.

Normally the HTML title for story page is the same as the story title.

However, in this article - “Director’s wife on big Mac fee feed“, which is about a company run by the wife of an independent Macquarie Airports director that has been on the payroll of at least four Macquarie Group investment vehicles, the HTML title isn’t the story title but “Macquarie Airports | MAp” - which is related to the key entity in the story.

Check out the image below to see what i mean (click on the image to see a larger version)

I’m not sure if it’s Fairfax trialling new ways to boost search relevancy while maintaining reader-friendly (witty?) story headings or just a one-off mistake (I can’t seem to see it in action anywhere else on the site).

Fairfax has been making a whole bunch of changes recently, including displaying how many people are currently on the page, to related coverage listings, to contextual information (e.g. in the business section you can see top stories in business from any business related page). So maybe this is part of that program.

If it is part of a program of changes, it would be nice to think that this is based on some semantic analysis tool that is auto creating the title, rather than being a manual process - but that’s probably hoping for too much.

And in any case, I’m no SEO expert, so maybe this wouldn’t even make a difference.

Interesting though…