This is the exact reason that we had to introduce "og:title" into the Open Graph Protocol. http://ogp.me/
We tried our best to just use but is it so full of junk that it is unusable for Facebook stream stories.
Title Junk
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Title Junk
#52Apple’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…
You should see Google products. Matt Cutts did a Google SEO 101 audit and released the results once. Suffice it to say that a bunch of intelligent engineers given mostly-free reign over their development roadmaps do not necessarily converge on a consistent, competent onpage SEO strategy. (Not mentioned in the audit, but equally true: if you work at Google, you can do everything wrong and still rank fine, because your projects will have more link equity than God. Plus, if Google desires to give you more prominent billing on the Internet, there are very easy ways of making that happen.)
Re: Title Junk
#53Apple’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…
Great, so if you have a bunch of shrunken tabs, you just see "Apple" over and over. Usability experts have said for years to put the subject first in the page title and then tack on branding afterward if you must.
Safari actually handles this case intelligently -- it dynamically removes overlapping prefixes from tab titles. Looks like neither Chrome or Firefox do the same.
Re: Title Junk
#54Re: Title Junk
#55As someone who has about 100 tabs open in Firefox at any given moment, I firmly believe that the description of page content must appear before the title of the website or any other SEO junk in the title. This is what I see in my Firefox tab bar right now: http://imagebin.org/128865
What does "Hacker..." tell me? Or "Timoth..."? On the other hand, "SQL Co..." at least lets me know the page is about SQL. Same goes for "n-gram...", "Sylistic..." and "HTML5".
Re: Title Junk
#56Given that do matter for SEO, I wonder if there are any drawbacks to stuffing the with keywords but, on page load, changing it to something short & meaningful, for a more pleasant bookmarking & browsing experience.
Could be nice but my guess is it would still bung up your listing in a search results page.
Re: Title Junk
#57Given that do matter for SEO, I wonder if there are any drawbacks to stuffing the with keywords but, on page load, changing it to something short & meaningful, for a more pleasant bookmarking & browsing experience.
Could be nice but my guess is it would still bung up your listing in a search results page.
That's the intention. (Or at least a necessary and sometimes-beneficial and necessary effect of using the title for SEO juice.)
Re: Title Junk
#58MSNBC is the fourth result at Google in a search for “news”, but its page title is so long that “MSNBC” doesn’t actually appear in the result entry title. that is hilarious. i wonder how quickly you can a/b test a change on a website with regard to its pagerank.
The problem with pagerank is that it's exceedingly hard to a/b test.
There's multiple factors involved in this but here's a few of the obvious ones: For most sites your pagerank is typically determined by your root. (Unless google detects you're a hosting company like blogspot) So if you try to a/b test your leaf pages their pagerank is completely domainated by the root. Pagerank is not that frequently updated. (Depending on how much traffic you have.) There aren't individual and seperate googlebots to test against to seperate pageranks in tests so creating clean tests is very hard because Google very often updates their algorithms. (Try looking up ranking shuffles and you'll see what I mean.. every time there's a shuffle there's a furious scramble to figure out what changed and why and how to counteract it.) Even if you could a/b test would you really want to? For now, a successful business only has to stay slightly ahead of the curve to trounce its competitors. Sure, a/b testing might get you valuable knowledge if your goal is to be an SEO consultant (well, one worth actually paying anyway, a lot of "SEO consultants" in my opinion read a few blog posts a couple of years ago and have been charging for that as gospel ever since) but if you're a company with a product it's probably going to cost you more money than it earns.
Re: Title Junk
#59MSNBC is the fourth result at Google in a search for “news”, but its page title is so long that “MSNBC” doesn’t actually appear in the result entry title. that is hilarious. i wonder how quickly you can a/b test a change on a website with regard to its pagerank.
The problem with pagerank is that it's exceedingly hard to a/b test.
There's multiple factors involved in this but here's a few of the obvious ones:s For most sites your pagerank is typically determined by your root. (Unless google detects you're a hosting company like blogspot) So if you try to a/b test your leaf pages their pagerank is completely domainated by the root. Pagerank is not that frequently updated. (Depending on how much traffic you have.) There aren't individual and seperate googlebots to test against to seperate pageranks in tests so creating clean tests is very hard because Google very often updates their algorithms. (Try looking up ranking shuffles and you'll see what I mean.. every time there's a shuffle there's a furious scramble to figure out what changed and why and how to counteract it.) Even if you could a/b test would you really want to? For now, a successful business only has to stay slightly ahead of the curve to trounce its competitors. Sure, a/b testing might get you valuable knowledge if your goal is to be an SEO consultant (well, one worth actually paying anyway, a lot of "SEO consultants" in my opinion read a few blog posts a couple of years ago and have been charging for that as gospel ever since) but if you're a company with a product it's probably going to cost you more money than it earns.
Re: Title Junk
#60The New Yorker’s home page title is shamefully sloppy:
National and world news, Profiles, culture, reviews, fiction, poetry : The New Yorker
The New Yorker — arguably the most precisely punctuated and copy-edited publication in the English-speaking world — would never use a colon like that (i.e., with a preceding space) in print. And why in the world is “Profiles” capitalized?
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Who are these title-junk keywords aimed at? Google? Do you they really think that putting “breaking news” in their home page title...
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Why "Profiles" is capitalized?. What does he mean by "Do you they really..."?
People make mistakes.
I agree with his point. Wish he didn't pick on small things.