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Geek Culture / Forum page titles - question for rich

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 1st Jan 2007 13:53
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Rich, why do you set the titles with Javascript at the end but have them all hard coded to the same title in the head?

For SEO (not just for traffic, but to make the thread subject search work better) wouldn't it be better to have the title set in the head to start with? SE's like Google cant pick-up title changes made by JS.

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hyrichter
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Posted: 1st Jan 2007 14:46 Edited at: 1st Jan 2007 14:46
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Good question there. I had never bothered to see how Rich was setting the titles, but I noticed that when first clicking on a link with a slow connection, it shows the old title first, and then after the page is loaded, it changes it.

It seems simple enough to just have the title tag linked to a PHP function.


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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 1st Jan 2007 15:54
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You'd have thought so - plus the SEO benefits will be immense! There are SO many threads on this forum that, although being indexed, are having a completely non-descriptive title...

Personally, I'd set the title to:
TGCF - Forum page titles - question for rich

TGCF = The Games Creators Forum... Keep it short so not to waste keyword space.

I wouldn't bother putting the board name in the title, there is no need. We always know where we are in the forum by looking at the top of the page. I'm personally more interested in the thread title - and so is the search engine.

This would be a 10 second fix and could potentially bring in a HUGE amount of traffic to the forum and therefore LOADS of exposure to the products. Seems a "no brainer" to me... but I probably dont know the full story. Maybe there is a reason Rich hasn't done this yet...

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Richard Davey
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Posted: 1st Jan 2007 16:59
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The forum code doesn't output the html of the entire page. It's a far less trivial change than you'd think, harking back to the days when the forum wasn't on its own server, and was fully contained within the TGC site. Thousands of lines of legacy code remain here that impact on this, otherwise it would have been done years ago. For now the JS will do, this won't change until the forum codebase does.

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 1st Jan 2007 19:35
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ahhhhh... see I thought it was a simple query on the page load which grabbed the thread ID, if set in the $_GET, and looked up the thread name and set it that way - but it sounds like a much bigger job than that.

Shame really...

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Jess T
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Posted: 2nd Jan 2007 01:53 Edited at: 2nd Jan 2007 01:53
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Not that it's a good way to do things but, I've taken to using ob_start() and ob_flush_contents() to catch all the html output so I can set headers, and the title, etc, etc.

For my site it's not a big issue since I have very little information per page, but with these forums it would be quite a bad idea to use it I'd say. At any rate, I just thought I'd put it out there as an option.

Having said that Rich, you are the one with the Zend certificate!

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