Could SEO make strong collocations stronger?

Posted on 02/03/2013 by alexcase

When I was updating the post below listing all and every ELT publisher, I also changed its name from “Full list of ELT publishers” to “Complete list of ELT publishers” as it seemed something that people would be very slightly more likely to stick in a search engine. I then wondered if the (at least) tens of thousands of people doing the same thing every day could actually change the language, especially as more and more English is learnt on the internet rather than at home and in school. And then I wondered if it would matter. And then I wrote this blog post. And then, hopefully, someone will comment and make everything clear for me without me having to wait for the next David Crystal book.

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2 Responses to Could SEO make strong collocations stronger?

  1. Torn Halves's avatar Torn Halves says:
    17/03/2013 at 17:39

    Geeky reply: It needn’t do, because if you’re using a good CMS or using something like the Yoast plugin for WordPress you can set a meta-title that is different from the title displayed on the page, so you don’t have to dumb-down your language to approximate the sort of stuff the search engine algorithms are able to work with.

  2. IELTS Singapore's avatar IELTS Singapore says:
    18/04/2013 at 18:56

    Interesting. This posts makes me think of how much power Google has to change the way we speak/write. As long as Google is as popular as it is now (with 80+% of Internet users using it), their algorithms and all that would definitely have an effect on our English!

    If good English is derived from Corpus language, Google is the biggest corpus around and I wonder if that would have any effect upon standard English one day.

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