ok .. so i'm not the target audience here (male, fifty-two, middle management programme producer. not even gay) but you've got to agree with most of what your man Matt says.

This might take a little longer to get there, but if they keep up this level of quality, they will get there all right. It even appeals to me.

My two teenage daughters are talking about it. (they told me to check it out last night .. before I read this piece). And they had NO idea 3am was a newspaper thing. They read it because one of their friends emailed them something funny.
Now they are hooked.

To answer Tom's question, I guess if I was buying the advertising, I'd be a lot happier knowing the ads were being seen by people who actually enjoyed the content they were up against. But like I say, i know nothing…. I'm too old for all this. (But I do like the site!!)

Web friendly content and engaged audiences are not mutually exclusive.

Why are you looking at newspaper website as a reason not to keep search engines in mind (they suck!) when you should be looking at TMZ/PerezHilton (which both have huge, engaged audiences) as reasons to invest heavily in a search engine friendly format!

I think you're confusing black hat SEO (bad, and probably employed by some newspaper sites) with white hat SEO (entirely healthy and natural- every news site should subscribe to this view).

And you're effectively describing a fantasy with this paragraph: "We want it to grow a fanbase. To get good word of mouth. For people to engage with it. Enjoy it. Come back to it for a laugh. Tell their mates about it. Feel like they’re part of something."

How do you do that in an internet age? You get the best ranking in Google, and stay there. You make your content extremely linkable and embeddable. Better ranking in Google is not selling your publication's soul. It's improving your product.

I won't even attempt to address your argument that reaching for fewer page views is an honourable tactic!

http://twitter.com/coneee

As Tom says, not focussing on Google is fine, but it doesnt mean you have to make a website difficult to use. Writing for web usability just happens to overlap with SEO. Even if your cunning plan is to turn it into a walled garden once you hit 10k users. Even more so.

What about if your users want to share a link on facebook? All the pages have the same name, so who would click them? Title tags aren't just used for Google…

If you think I'm talking bollocks and have been brainwashed by google, then why not prove me wrong - using Google's favourite weapon - A/B split testing.

Set up a split test with the random navigation and one with one that explains what to expect when you click. I'd put money on the latter getting more page views per user and more repeat visits.

I've never had the opportunity to try it myself, but I have had senior ex-print editorial people pull rank on trusted IA, research and ten years of experience and seen it fail many times. I almost get déjà vue in fact.

They say the difference between in insanity and genius is measured only by success - especially for those being 'brave'. 3am is certainly attempting to be brave, and only time will tell whether they pulled it off.

The 'we don't care about Google' stuff is fine - but I wonder if a headline like "This is so obvious - but we don't care!"  will work for online readers.

Writing online headlines is far more than just mechanical SEO.

fair play to them I say. SEO is potentially removing all imagination and individuality from newspaper sites (I know, I work on one).

It's not the sort of content I'll be checking religiously, but I do honestly hope it works for them.

I wonder if potential advertisers like the idea of a small loyal following?

I helped develop 3am.co.uk.
Just thought the following insight might be useful:

We know full well this site won't perform brilliantly in google. And guess what? we don't care! (oooh… someone doesn't think SEO is the be all and end all .. good grief, what a shocker).

We want this site to perform well over a period of time. Not live or die by how many times we can write Britney Spears or Michael Jackson into the metadata.

We want it to grow a fanbase. To get good word of mouth. For people to engage with it. Enjoy it. Come back to it for a laugh. Tell their mates about it. Feel like they're part of something.

This is about tapping into passion, not page impressions.

By choosing the "odd" navigation we did, by writing funny headlines that might not perform well in google, by blatantly disregarding the ABC of good SEO, we are positively eschewing the opportunity for multi-milllions of casual users, in favour of a smaller band of regular, engaged, users.

Yes, we will have a smaller audience than we could have had. But the vast majority of our audience will be there because they knew what 3am.co.uk is all about and they'll come back tomorrow and the day after.
They won't be one of, oh, 30 million users (what a brilliantly accurate description that term is, btw) who happened to stumble onto it on a search engine and then left just as quick.
Like, er, some of the exceptionally well SEO'd newspaper websites losing vast fortunes by the hour.

I appreciate this isn't the obvious way to do things. But then look where the obvious is taking us.

Matt.

If they are happy with just driving traffic from their print products and losing market share to all the other celeb sites, then invalid html, duplicate title tags and random section names are fine.

But their target audience WILL be using search engines.  (Said users might not realise they are - they'll just being using 'the internet' and typing into the search box on the virgin media homepage…)

It is. But I wonder if the target readership really cares about valid HTML, Google search visibility etc

Another media website designed by people who can't write valid html. It's a mess.