Ok, I admit, it's been a very long day. However, I was looking through my logs at recent hits and stumbled across someone who had come to our site using the phrase "union organizing software". We're in the top 5 from 144,000 using that phrase. It's useful because we're in the business of providing organizing software to progressive groups like labour unions.

However, I was looking down the link right above us, which was from CBC, "Union discusses call to organize prostitutes". It's a legitimate story that actually talks about a call from a member of CUPE, one of our clients, to unionize sex workers. The funny thing is the way that google displayed the search query such that the main story was confused with text from the blocks on the bottom of the page so that "organize prostitutes" was right next to "Microsoft attracted":

The union leaders say they are not actively working to 
organize prostitutes. .... Microsoft attracted 
to online advertising: Software giant Microsoft has ...

Microsoft is facing some pretty serious challenges -- especially with their latest release of Windows (which seems to be driving lots of folks to try to Ubuntu) -- but times aren't that tough yet. But it did make me think about how easy it is for things to be auto-summarize badly. We have had clients in the past who set up their sites so that the sidebars weren't displayed to Drupal, using code like what is described here.

It would be nice if Google recognized & respected tags indicating where the actual content starts and stops. Some sort of "<!-- start content -->" at the beginning of an article and "<!-- end content -->", but I haven't seen anything like that mentioned in the SEO reading I've done. Would allow for better auto summaries, but fewer funny mashups.

I also wanted to write briefly to say that it is important to write content that is suited for the audience that you are hoping to attract. I do hope that this article attracts people who are searching for ideas on enhancing their websites, rather than those who want to find out more about prostitutes.