(This post originally appeared on Voce Nation)

There have been countless stories written over the last few years about “click bait” headlines, most of them full of hand-wringing about devaluing the reader’s time and so on. But there’s another angle on this that doesn’t get the attention it deserves and which (and yes, I’m aware of the contradiction in saying this) is summed up by one perfect headline.

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That headline – and many more like it – shows a bigger shift than just toward “click bait,” though that’s part of it. It shows an almost complete abandonment of search visibility in favor of headlines that work well on social, at least for the moment.

Contrast that, though, with the URL for the story, which is still very search-oriented:

http://time.com/3914492/blythe-danner-madoff/

These sorts of headline tactics have obviously moved out from publications like Buzzfeed, Mic and others into more…what do we even call them anymore? Is Time mainstream? Do we measure that by page views? Print versions? Perhaps “legacy sites” is a better nomenclature. Regardless, this is now commonplace across the web on sites of all shapes and sizes as everyone seeks to get the attention of the Facebook and other social audiences.

What’s lost, though, is the broader web. If we’re not creating stories that are findable via search (and as long as search on social networks ranges from merely bad to wholly unusable) then we’re quite literally losing our archives.

We used to fret over whether our headlines were packed with enough search keywords and that there was a date not only at the top of the page but also in the URL slug. Now we’re operating in a world where headlines should be as vague as possible to encourage clicking from Facebook and many publications are eschewing dates because they want their content to be evergreen. The latter is also fairly unfriendly to search since it makes it difficult to gauge the timeliness of what you’re reading.

This isn’t meant to sound nostalgic for some idyllic time that’s past, but this is definitely a time that is if not in the past at least not not in fashion at the moment.

It’s incumbent on content marketing strategists (you know, like the ones you find here at Voce) to walk the line between staying current with these trends and advising clients on long-term best practices. That can be a tough balance to achieve and, honestly, will require some experimentation as tactics are tested, reported on and adjusted as necessary.