launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:31 AM, Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2009/9/22 Michael Hudson <michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> Deryck Hodge wrote:
>>
>>> Martin, Barry please feel free to clarify if I misrepresented you. :)
>>
>> I don't really have anything to add, but if "Questions you asked about
>> Ubuntu Linux : Questions for Ubuntu Linux : Ubuntu" is a sensible page
>> title, I'm an ewok.
>
> But that's something you can start from and improve on, and every
> improvement you make is global. For example, it looks like we can
> remove the information about the pillar, if we keep the rule that its
> name must be mentioned in the label for the current view, and so on.
>

Yes, this can be improved, but should we have to devote so much
developer time to something with so little real gain?  It feels to me
like were working too hard for such a minor problem.

The two most convincing arguments in favor of this is are having
consistent page titles across the site and improved Google-fu.  I've
already asked Martin what exactly google-fu is... PageRank? Search
result placement? More of our pages in search results?  I was told
it's the latter of these that Martin is concerned about.  I just can't
see how these reverse breadcrumbs gain us any more of our pages in
Google results.  In fact, it looks a lot like keyword stuffing and
could get us penalized.  While data may suggest that no one looks at
the title in the browser, there are plenty of credible sources, both
inside Google and outside, that suggest that making human-readable
page elements does much more for search engine placement.

Also, I don't think we should use the excuse "no one looks at page
titles" as license to make page titles unfriendly to humans? :)

Consistency, too, is a great goal but like someone said earlier a
well-applied set of rules for writing page titles seems a much better
use of time and resources then trying to get programmatic page titles.
 I realize the idea of generated page titles seems like a nice
engineering solution, but in practice, I think we'll spend several
rounds "improving" when we could have just crafted decent titles and
been done with it.

Cheers,
deryck



-- 
Deryck Hodge
https://launchpad.net/~deryck
http://www.devurandom.org/