On: King of Clickbait

[Animats]

The title of this article is too ironic not to comment on. -- If we can't trust titles what now do we use to decide what content is worth our time?

This guy's sites feed different titles to different readers, see who clicks through, and adjust accordingly. That could be detected by suitable anti-spam algorithms.

[rdrey → Animats]

Many/most sites do A/B testing and there is nothing inherently wrong with it, so why would it be classified as spam?

[bduerst → rdrey]

I think what they're trying to say is that sites that specifically test just to garner clicks, as opposed to conversions & sales, could be deemed as being "spammy".

In the content world, would you rather sites have good content or good traffic? The trend seems to be that these two are not always correlated.