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HTML markup: Bad use of title element

description

Please do not use the same page title for all issues / discussions. For example when you go to project "AJAX Control Toolkit" you find that each post in the issue tracker has the same page title:

<title>AJAX Control Toolkit - View Issue</title>

This is not good. At least the title of the issue should be present in within the HTML <title> tags.
Example of better use - short and precise title for a specific issue:

<title>#16903: DropShadow interfer with DragPanel</title>

Following this convention will give you meaningful listings when you perform searches via search engines like Google. Remember that what is within the title element is what is displayed in search engine results pages. For example, in Google's search field you may type the following to get a listing of all pages within the issue tracker for "AJAX Control Toolkit"

site:http://www.codeplex.com/AjaxControlToolkit/WorkItem

What you get now is merely a listing of blue links all reading the same:

"AJAX Control Toolkit - View Issue"

This is rather useless to distinguish the pages.

Moreover, better use of title element will help users from the outside world to find relevant projects via search engine result pages. When users here at CodePlex create a new discussion post/issue the subject is often chosen carefully. This effort is currently wasted except for internal searches within CodePlex.

If some variant of the above suggestion is followed I would at not all be surprised if we see a drastic increase in hits from Google and other search engines.

comments

koyama wrote Jan 17, 2009 at 5:33 AM

I am bumping this issue because CodePlex have apparently not understood how severe an issue this is....

All CodePlex projects are virtually invisible to Google. Many projects are never found because they are ranked low in listings by Google.

Considering that this should only take minutes to fix I would like to know why you haven't. Is it to protect the server against too many hits from search engines?

saraford wrote Apr 24, 2009 at 10:09 PM

this is a good point. we're thinking of using

AJAX Control Toolkit - Issue #16903: DropShadow interfer with DragPanel

koyama wrote Apr 25, 2009 at 12:31 AM

this is a good point. we're thinking of using
AJAX Control Toolkit - Issue #16903: DropShadow interfer with DragPanel
While that suggestion is way better than the current, I would still consider alternative versions.

Rather than this:

AJAX Control Toolkit - Issue #16903: DropShadow interfer with DragPanel

This might be better:

Issue #16903: DropShadow interfer with DragPanel - AJAX Control Toolkit

You can think of this as follows: The primary portion is the name of the page within the scope of page's parent directory (in this case within http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/WorkItem/), secondary portion is the title of the (sub)domain, in this case the project name "AJAX Control Toolkit".

Please consider this:
  1. In Google search results only 66 characters are displayed in the link title. If you have a long project name you may not see many characters from the issue title because of truncation. Example what the above would look like.
AJAX Control Toolkit - Issue #16903: DropShadow interfer with...

With longer project names, situation gets worse. A listing with truncated issue titles is not very useful when you do a site directory search in Google within work items for a project:
site:http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/WorkItem
  1. In your browser, with multiple tabs open, page titles are used also as tab labels. There is truncation due to limited tab width. Again, this makes it hard to distinguish tabs from same project if the title always starts with the project name.
  2. The URL itself is indexed by search engines. Since "AJAX Control Toolkit" is already a part of the URL, http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=16903, there is probably not much gain with respect to SEO letting the project name occupy expensive space at the beginning of the .

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