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April 19, 2011

Kate Middleton jelly bean story prompts amusing Independent prank url

Newsdesk demands for ever more stories about Kate Middleton and the Royal Wedding may be pushing hacks to breaking point.

As evidence, I cite this piece in The Independent from Monday about a jellybean resembling Kate Middleton which is being sold on Ebay.

Check out the url. Was it penned by whichever online news functionary was tasked with following up the story from the Telegraph in pursuit of a cheap traffic boost? Or is it the work of some outside prankster?

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-fuck-it-lets-just-print-it-2269573.html

11.20am update: I see from comments below that – for reasons that are far beyond me – this fun url probably didn’t come from inside the Independent. Although it does come up when you do a search for ‘jelly bean’ on the Independent website. Any ho, it makes a good point.

Update#2: SEO specialist Malcolm Coles has explained more about all this. Apparently  you can change their urls to anything you want provided you keep in the “unique identifier number”.

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