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I don't think there's a clear answer. Longer headlines are harder to share on some social media sites (especially twitter) and Google won't display much past 55-75 characters in search results. But from a user engagement perspective, I bet Huffington post is finding some success with the longer headlines. This probably has as much to do with how they display the headlines on their site, and also how they distribute the content and share, so it doesn't mean this is a system that would work for everyone. Best practice remains writing headlines between 55-75 characters. But best practices were made to be broken

It's going to come down to just a couple of things: How well the content is written--what's the reading grade level score, are there grammatical errors, etc. How close the content comes to existing content on the web. I'm not familiar with these two companies, but from what you say, it sounds like #1 isn't going to be an issue.  And most likely #2 won't be a problem either--even though realistically they're going to be looking up the raw data from somewhere (Wikipedia!) and doing their best to completely rewrite it....and that's always a challenge. But the reason I don't think #2 is honestly going to be a problem is because right now, Google doesn't seem to be very good at spotting near duplicate content with even just light edits.  Or even WITHOUT edits, just with other content on the page.  As an example, search for this phrase (including the quotes) in Google (it's taken straight from Freebase, i.e. Wikipedia's back door): "The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there" Google finds and displays 96 YES NINETY-SIX pages before chopping it off and leaving it to the supplementals. Will this go on forever?  Of course not, Google is undoubtedly working at trying to handle detection of this kind of thing.  Certainly it isn't in Google's quality interests to list 96 pages all that suck the description of something straight out of Freebase.  But, this paints a picture of where they are today in doing that....and that tells us that they're a long ways from taking a run at content that you've hand-rewritten from other sources....even if it's a light rewrite.

Hi Maria What do you mean by "Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link" -- Is there an issue with linking back from directories to your site? Does this apply to submitting my website to social bookmark websites using a specific anchor text that am optimizing for? Thanks James

It was a mix of both. There were some embedded keywords with nofollow links (which I thought were ok given that they were nofollowed). The keywords weren't forced in, just naturally present and then linked, doing so to have a nice balance between follow and nofollow links to the site.