Title Junk
daringfireball.net
Title Junk
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Re: Title Junk
#2If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.
Re: Title Junk
#3If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.
Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons?
ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely nothing useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.
Re: Title Junk
#4We'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" (see meta description, meta keywords, and comments for worse examples. These often aren't even escaped properly.)
Re: Title Junk
#5If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.
Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons? ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely nothing useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.
Do you really regularly visit billions of sites?
Re: Title Junk
#6If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.
Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons? ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely nothing useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.
I can distinguish the icons of every site I visit on a semi-regular basis.
Re: Title Junk
#7If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.
Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons? ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely nothing useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.
Do you really want to distinguish a site by the title attribute? Think about it, a site already has two "branding elements": favicon and domain. Why not leave the title for just content, the thing that the site visitor is most likely interested in?
Re: Title Junk
#8Putting 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 should probably optimize for humans first, but not humans only. That's just not the way the web works.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
EDIT: I realize the SEOMoz data is based on SEO experts ranking what they believe is most influential, but what else are you going to go on? Maybe patio11 or someone else on here who is an SEO whiz can offer some of their experience.
Re: Title Junk
#9It is amazingly annoying to users, but the fact remains that crudding up the title tag does actually provide tangible SEO benefits.
Re: Title Junk
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons? ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely nothing useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.
Do you really regularly visit billions of sites?
I visit more than a handful. How useful do you think a dozen unfamiliar favicons on my tabs or bookmarks are?
And why would I have to visit billions of sites? The issue is that billions of sites exist, and a random little picture tells me nothing about what site it's from unless I already have it memorized.