The Express newspaper has cocked up its implementation of the rel=canonical command SO BADLY that it has created an infinite number of duplicate webpages ... many of which now have links from elsewhere on the internet.

There have been a couple of articles recently (see below) proclaiming the slow death of RSS as a way for users to subscribe to websites. So how do the number of subscribers to newspaper RSS feeds compare?

Here's a table that compares the number of subscribers in Google Reader to each paper's most popular RSS feed 18 months ago and today.

Google's launched a new feature that analyzes reading level scores for websites. Here are the scores for national UK newspapers, plus the overall verdict Google gives on the site's reading level.
There's no right score - ...

Google says it has "taken action" and no longer trusts links from a major UK newspaper group - apparently referring to the Daily Express website.

The Express and OK sites appeared to suffer page rank penalties in April - and Google has now confirmed it has taken action against a UK newspaper site.

There was a story yesterday that the Express has been emailing SEOs selling links. I went over to the Express home page. And was fairly shocked to see it has a toolbar pagerank of just 4, which seems incredibly low for a newspaper site (er, it puts it on a par with my homepage toolbar pagerank!).

It definitely used to be higher than this.

I pointed out this morning that the Express was talking utter rubbish claiming that the BBC was keeping up twitter accounts with 0 or 2 followers. The real numbers were in the 000s.

It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC's followers. That is all.

National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October - an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

I posted yesterday about the shameful reporting of the tragic death of a girl who died on the same day as getting the cervical cancer vaccine - and how, without any evidence of a link, the papers were giving the impression that the vaccine, which will save hundreds of lives a year, is unsafe.

So, how are the papers covering the news that, as the BBC news site puts it in its 3rd most important story "Cancer jab 'unlikely' death cause: A girl who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a 'serious underlying medical condition', an NHS Trust says"?

The UK media have learned nothing from the debacle over the MMR vaccine - where they relentlessly covered stories doubting the safety of MMR, putting the lives of children at risk.
They are continuing their habit ...

I just tweeted that I was finding it hard to resist the temptation to be the first to sidewiki the home page of UK newspapers. (Sidewiki is Google's new way to let you see what other users have said about a page while you look at it).

It looks like I'm too late as the Mail already has been sidewikied as this picture shows.

I wasn't going to carry on giving examples of the Express truncating story descriptions. But SARitchie and SharkSEO sent me some more ... so here are some more from today.

The other day I advised not to truncate text automatically when describing pages on your navigation pages, after the Express reported public sector borrowing at £16.1. They've done it again with the report of Man U's victory over Man City, which is described thus: "Manchester United have brought home victory after a nail-biting Man".

The Express's home-page template truncates the introductory copy of each featured story if it's too long. I'd been hoping that this would lead to a hilariously rude half-sentence one day. This has never happened. So I'm reduced to using this example.

National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures in the table.

The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).

The Express has a new homepage beta. I was rude about it on Twitter today. I thought I should be more constructive. So here's a wireframe for an alternative.

The idea is that the 4 main areas - each dedicated to one of the Express's obsessions - pull in content from around the web (including the Express's own) in real time and link to it.

In my survey, 100% of polls I looked at are rubbish. Therefore I conclude that all surveys are meaningless.

There are more than 100,000 citations on Wikipedia that reference the Guardian - more than twice as much as any other UK national newspaper. The FT is way down the list - barely higher than the Sun.

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. And 62.8% of users look at just one page. Only the Sun (4 pages/day per user), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) come out above average in terms of daily page views per user.