
Title Junk - shawndumas
http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/title_junk
======
ryanwaggoner
_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 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.

~~~
patio11
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.

~~~
portman
Sorry for being so dense, but _who_ is wrong: Daring Fireball or SEOMoz?

~~~
patio11
Unsurprisingly, the professional Mac pundit did not beat out the SEO thought
leader on SEO 101.

------
jacobolus
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 Store (U.S.)

Apple – Mac

Apple – Play music and more on iPod.

Apple – iPhone 4 – Video calls, multitasking, HD video, and more

Apple – iPad – See the web, email, and photos like never before.

Apple – iTunes – Everything you need to be entertained

Apple – Support

iPad – iPad WiFi – iPad Wifi + 3G – Apple Store (U.S.)

Apple – MacBook Air – It thinks and acts like a full-size Mac.

Apple – iPod classic – Read the iPod classic technical specifications.

Apple – iPhone 4 – Design of the display, A4 processor, and more

Apple – iTunes – What's on – Discover music, movies, and more.

Apple – Why You’ll Love a Mac – A Mac is the ultimate upgrade.

Apple – In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic for iPod and iPhone

Apple – Science – Inside the Image – Quantum Views

(Still, overall, Apple’s is better than most websites: it’s pretty clear what
each of the above pages is about just from its title.)

~~~
pak
What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point
while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!

~~~
jacobolus
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.

~~~
blantonl
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.

~~~
napierzaza
Yes, file your evidence away for when the trial of "web-based-organic-growth"
Vs. Apple inc begins.

------
InfinityX0
This is highly inaccurate. Title tags have EVERY implication on ranking for a
keyword. For the most competitive keywords in the world, it's very possible
that certain sites _could_ rank without having it in the title tag due to the
sheer volume of people linking to them with relevant anchor text, but this is
highly unlikely. And more importantly, it doesn't make sense _not_ to do it,
because it's pretty ridiculous to put UX in front of strong SEO in title tags,
because the large majority of users completely ignore the title tags - UNLESS
they show up in search results.

And, yes, you can't show up in search results (most often) unless you have
SEO-optimized title tags. I would recommend serving up a specific SEO-title
tag, and then another, closely related article title on the page itself - at
least as it comes to news pieces.

And the other hand, I'd agree that it is in companies best interest to have
the title tags short enough to get their brand in there - because brand
relevancy helps CTR substantially. When CTR goes up, ranking _may_ increase
since Google is looking at these things in their algo. Then you get more
clicks, views and links, and it starts a downhill, positive domino effect for
your website.

SEOMofo has a great tool for making sure you don't breach Google's title
tag/meta description character limit in the SERPs:

<http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html>

~~~
tjogin
Maybe he didn't mean that the title is irrelevant from a SEO perspective (I
don't think he meant that, it's hardly a closely guarded secret).

Maybe he doesn't think people tend to google for "breaking news" much.

Maybe he meant that ranking is great, but what if people _don't click_ your
jabberwocky title because it's confusing.

Just sayin'.

------
mikeklaas
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 <title> 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.)

~~~
frossie
_"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.

------
damoncali
It is amazingly annoying to users, but the fact remains that crudding up the
title tag does actually provide tangible SEO benefits.

~~~
masklinn
> the fact remains that crudding up the title tag does actually provide
> tangible SEO benefits.

Source/study?

~~~
mikeindustries
Sure. Here's a vacuum test study I performed on this very subject. Looks at
the relative effects of words in URL, Title, Headings, and Body:
[http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-
round...](http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-roundabout-
seo-test)

It's a little TLDR, but the point above is spelled out near the end in the
final "conclusion". Cheers.

------
markbao
Trading an SEO advantage for a string to look better in the title bar and in
bookmarks seems like a dumb trade.

~~~
tel
Unless you (Gruber) care prominently about Apple/Google and other places with
enough inbound link equity that your marginal SEO increase is minuscule and
marginal UX*appreciation gain is large.

~~~
markbao
But for everyone else, there's MasterCard.

------
Semiapies
_"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.

~~~
pak
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.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_resolution_operator>

~~~
pbiggar
Apologies for the pedantry I display below, but your comment is so full of
errors that I got riled up. Again, apologies, I'm sure you were just trying to
add interesting information for other hackers.

'::' is not a punctuation symbol, at least not in English. It is two of the
same symbol (colon) in succession.

Now in Hebrew, it may be considered a single symbol (though a cursory google
makes me think Paamayim Nekudotayim might just be the Hebrew term for 'double-
colon'). If Paamayim Nekudotayim were a single symbol in Hebrew, the term has
certainly not migrated to English, at least outside the PHP community.

In programming languages, it is commonly used as a scope resolution operator,
and dates back to C++ at least. In PHP, they often call it Paamayim
Nekudotayim. But this does not mean that you would be correct to come across
the syntax in a C++ source file and call it Paamayim Nekudotayim.

So to summarize:

\- it is not a punctuation symbol \- if it were, it would not be called that
in English \- it very likely isnt a single symbol in Hebrew \- it is the scope
resolution operator is _some_ languages \- in those languages, it is not
called Paamayim Nekudotayim, except in PHP.

(and after that rant, I fully expect to be proved wrong on some of those
claims, which I will deserve).

~~~
pak
No, thank you, I was indeed being imprecise, you are correct that double colon
doesn't exist as punctuation in English or Hebrew grammar so it's not a
"punctuation symbol". I guess I meant "programming symbol", but it is also
used in other contexts such as ratio equivalence in math, or abbreviating
analogies e.g. dog:house::fish:bowl. I guess I don't know what to call it,
really.

------
there
_MSNBC 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.

~~~
smokinn
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.

------
kellysutton
The mere fact that SEO exists as an industry is an aberration and just a
testament to the long way the search engines must go.

People that make business decisions based on SEO are putting the cart before
the horse and will go away quickly. Fine-tune it, but don't obsess over it.

~~~
cheald
There are a lot of SEO snake oil salesmen out there, but that doesn't change
the fact that there is a viable industry built around making your product more
visible to your target audience. Until Google is _psychic_ and can infer what
you want by any search input, SEO will still have tangible and legitimate
value.

------
ptarjan
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 <title> but is it so full of junk that it is
unusable for Facebook stream stories.

~~~
iaskwhy
Maybe browsers could use it when available. I use it whenever I can and with
good results!

------
GeneralMaximus
As 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".

~~~
yuvi
Safari will strip identical title prefixes in tab names for exactly that case.

Perhaps other browsers should copy this.

------
bergie
If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site
name from page titles and focus just on the content.

~~~
Semiapies
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.

~~~
scdlbx
I can distinguish the icons of every site I visit on a semi-regular basis.

~~~
Semiapies
And you never visit any other sites?

How useful to you is an unfamiliar favicon, or a row of tabs with an
assortment of unfamiliar favicons?

~~~
scdlbx
An unfamiliar favicon lets me know I am not somewhere I normally would be, and
to regard the site I am at more suspiciously. Without familiar favicons, I
would treat every site that way before looking at the page more thoroughly.
Obviously I do not rely solely on favicons, but they are a good initial way of
orienting myself when looking at tabs.

~~~
Semiapies
In other words, the favicon is only useful for familiar sites or for knowing a
page isn't from a familiar site. It's of absolutely no use in any other case,
whereas a site name or a domain in the title tag will actually tell me what
the site is in all cases.

~~~
bigiain
There is a meta pattern I recognise in my tab bar sometimes - I get pairs of
unfamiliarfavicon:hackernewsfavicon.

That it actually quite useful when I flick back to a random browser window
after being distracted... ("Ahhh, that's my timewasting window!")

------
chanux
_The 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?_

\--

 _Who are these title-junk keywords aimed at? Google? Do you they really think
that putting “breaking news” in their home page title..._

\--

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.

------
alanh
Given that <titles> do matter for SEO, I wonder if there are any drawbacks to
stuffing the <title> with keywords but, on page load, changing it to something
short & meaningful, for a more pleasant bookmarking & browsing experience.

~~~
jbrennan
Could be nice but my guess is it would still bung up your listing in a search
results page.

~~~
alanh
That's the intention. (Or at least a necessary and sometimes-beneficial and
necessary effect of using the title for SEO juice.)

------
jules
It's especially annoying when websites _prefix_ their title by "Hacker News".
Now all your tabs read like "Hacker News | Foo Bar [... other 6 relevant words
omitted]". That's what the favicon is for.

------
code_duck
"Surely, the name of the site should be the first thing (and in many cases,
the only thing) in the title of the home page."

Surely, this man has investigated known facts about SEO before making this
lengthy blog post about it. Surely?

The domain name alone will give you more then enough to go on regarding
searchability for the name of your site. Several studies have shown that
putting the branding last achieves better results for relevant searches than
putting it first.

------
StavrosK
To address his original point, this really only matters if you use bookmarking
software that uses the "lists of links" model, really...

------
henrymazza
Page titles are the only reason that made me dislike Tabs-on-top.

------
nowarninglabel
Perhaps the author should have tried Googling for "Breaking news" and then
opening the top 3 sites and looking at the titles of each, before making false
statements. I can't find any value in this blog post.

------
AgentConundrum
_Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s
rank in search engine indexes_

Paging patio11. Patio11 to this thread please.

------
aneth
Complaining about proper punctuation in web page titles seems a little
pedantic. Using colons and other strange "punctuation" is a substitute for
graphics and styling since these are not available in title bars. For those
cases where it is meant to be sort-of punctuation, I'd say titles on the
internet simply follow a different set of rules and conventions than prose, or
anything else prior, because they serve a different purpose.

~~~
jacobolus
The New Yorker (e.g.) is a publication known for its typographical pedantry,
for example writing diaereses in words such as coöperate or naïve; it’s
entirely uncharacteristic of them to have sloppily punctuated titles.

~~~
aneth
In this case, it's not typography - it's the closet thing they can get to
graphic design using ASCII in one line and still being dignified. If instead
of a colon it was a pretty little fig leaf we'd all feel more pedantically
satisfied. Unfortunately, that's not possible in titles - so they use a colon.

Regardless, I'm guessing the editor of the New Yorker has been to their
website. Her approval defines what it is that the New Yorker does, and what it
is known for. Sniping at such an organization previously known for pedantry is
a bit presumptuous.

~~~
chronomex
Unicode is _full_ of dingbats, most of which display properly in all modern
software:
[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/dingbats/utf8t...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/dingbats/utf8test.htm)

~~~
aneth
Fair enough. If they used them though, they might get sniped at for not
sticking to web conventions. There's no cover from snipers on the internet.

There might be reasons not to as well - I imagine they break some bookmark
tools, etc.

