Apple’s homepage is used as an example, since its title is simply “Apple”, but other pages at Apple’s site are named fairly inconsistently: some use curly apostrophes, others use straight ones. Some have sentences ending in periods; others don’t. Some use sentence case; others use title case. Some pages just state what the page is; others read like marketing babble. Examples: Apple Welcome to the Apple Store – Apple…
What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!
Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out. I'm pretty sure point (a) is false [1], and I'm absolutely sure that the conclusion (trust the Googlebot!) is. You…
I hate saying "trust me", but since I'm mentioned by name: he is as wrong as it is possible to be wrong about SEO. It's so wrong, its like me suggesting that all the cool iOS developers add their bezels with Photoshop, which is why you can't use Flash on an iPhone.
If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.
That works for Tabs - I just spent 10 minutes watching my browsing behavior, and realized the only thing I look at in Tabs, is the Favicon. Personally, Google has replaced my bookmarking behavior. I don't bookmark pages any more - when I need to search for them, I just google for the appropriate keywords. In fact, this works so well, it's rare that I even need to add a "site:" to give a hint as to which site to look…
I bookmark pages I want to visit later and take advantage of the location field to search my bookmarks, as I am paranoid a www search engine might forget about my obscure page.
"No one punctuates with colons like that." Apparently the Chicago Sun-Times does on its website, as do many other sites. " :: " is a simple visual separator that makes it clear that what's intended is not just a colon. It also prevents any confusion that can arise when you use a single colon or an em-dash as the title/site separator and then use the same punctuation element within a title.
If anybody wants to know the punctuation symbol that "::" is, it's called Paamayim Nekudotayim, better known in programming as the scope resolution operator. PHP (because of its Israeli roots) calls it by the Hebrew name.
Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out. I'm pretty sure point (a) is false [1], and I'm absolutely sure that the conclusion (trust the Googlebot!) is. You…
StackOverflow recently began adding keyword tags to their page titles to help increase SEO in combating clone sites: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/6556/does-the-... One user was unhappy with it, but Atwood's response is that they had no choice: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/71906/first-tag-in-t...
It is odd that Atwood calls these people "scrapers" when I'm pretty sure they are just using the dump file that you can download and then doing better SEO than SO (in the past, seems like SO now ranks ahead of them in most cases).
Apple’s homepage is used as an example, since its title is simply “Apple”, but other pages at Apple’s site are named fairly inconsistently: some use curly apostrophes, others use straight ones. Some have sentences ending in periods; others don’t. Some use sentence case; others use title case. Some pages just state what the page is; others read like marketing babble. Examples: Apple Welcome to the Apple Store – Apple…
What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!
Or, he just looked around at a few major website homepages, and used them as examples of decent titles. Gruber’s example did a fine job illustrating his point, I thought – I just found it interesting that even Apple, a company known for its fastidious care for such trivial details, has inconsistent titles across its sprawling website(s), and found the inconsistencies themselves interesting, because they illustrate slightly different approaches to writing titles by the different teams creating the pages. To be honest, I find your sarcasm entirely unhelpful to this discussion.
Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out. I'm pretty sure point (a) is false [1], and I'm absolutely sure that the conclusion (trust the Googlebot!) is. You…
I hate saying "trust me", but since I'm mentioned by name: he is as wrong as it is possible to be wrong about SEO. It's so wrong, its like me suggesting that all the cool iOS developers add their bezels with Photoshop, which is why you can't use Flash on an iPhone.
Sorry for being so dense, but who is wrong: Daring Fireball or SEOMoz?
We've spent dozens if not hundreds of man-hours trying to come up with reliable heuristics to get rid of "title junk". The state of the web in this regard is shameful. There are many sites that don't even include the article title in at all (even hackers like Zed Shaw get this wrong). It is yet another thing that proves the rule that "metadata that isn't prominently visible in the browser is guaranteed to be wrong" (…
"metadata that isn't prominently visible in the browser is guaranteed to be wrong"
Very true. Still, I wish title junk was my only problem. My bank's online banking home page has a title of "Home". Just that. "Home". No "Acme Bank Home", not even "Online :: Banking :: Home". In 2010. Go figure.
I hate saying "trust me", but since I'm mentioned by name: he is as wrong as it is possible to be wrong about SEO. It's so wrong, its like me suggesting that all the cool iOS developers add their bezels with Photoshop, which is why you can't use Flash on an iPhone.
Sorry for being so dense, but who is wrong: Daring Fireball or SEOMoz?
Unsurprisingly, the professional Mac pundit did not beat out the SEO thought leader on SEO 101.
What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!
Or, he just looked around at a few major website homepages, and used them as examples of decent titles. Gruber’s example did a fine job illustrating his point, I thought – I just found it interesting that even Apple, a company known for its fastidious care for such trivial details, has inconsistent titles across its sprawling website(s), and found the inconsistencies themselves interesting, because they illustrate sl…
This is evidence that Apple is not focused on web based organic growth. And why would/should they?
They have great marketing... mostly from the consumer.