
Max Levchin on how his personal loans startup is misunderstood - exolymph
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/max-levchin-affirm-misunderstood.html
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virgilp
Gotta love the HTML title - this was presumably the original article title,
right?

> PayPal Mafia Member Max Levchin Says His Lending Startup, Affirm, Is
> Misunderstood | Inc.com

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exolymph
Yep. We a/b test titles so you're never quite sure what you're going to end up
with.

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shostack
How does that impact things in terms of SEO? Is Google ok with changing titles
like that?

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RickS
I've noticed that the trend is to change the h1 on the page, but not the
<title> element or URL slug. This avoids the major SEO hit of the first-
scraped title suddenly going nowhere.

Presumably the search engines consider one url one article, know about the
title at time of scrape, and get most of their SEO juice from links to the
(unchanging) URL. I can imagine a scenario where the title changing isn't an
issue. Especially if you consider the articles being judged by the same
standard as eg a blog site homepage, which would presumably have an ever-
chanaging series of headings based on which posts were current.

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exolymph
I hope the paraphrased title is okay, since it conveys what the article is
actually about much better than the real one.

