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board.s9y.org: Change titles of threads

Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2009 5:40 am
by dhm
If you search for threads at board.s9y.org via Google & Co.,
you can't read the full thread title sometimes, because every thread starts with "Serendipity [s9y] Forums :: View topic" in title.

So I get for example results like: (this is especially horror, if you search only at board.s9y.org via "site:board.s9y.org")

I propose to change the titles to one of those or something similar:
  • THREADTITLE - board.s9y.org
  • THREADTITLE - Serendipity Forum
  • s9y: THREADTITLE - Serendipity Forum
In any case: the thread title should be at the beginning of the title (as possible).
It helps:
  • Users, which search for threads/content via external search engines (if users see the full title, they can spot that keywords, that they are looking for)
  • Users, which have many tabs with s9y threads open (so they can difference the threads)
  • board.s9y.org, because Google & Co. will rank you higher: you'll have less ballast in title - so the user-generated keywords (aka thread title) will be estimated more important

Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:29 pm
by winkiller
I'm not exactly sure where the "Serendipity [s9y] Forums" part comes from, but "View topic" is the default title of, well, viewing a topic.

At the top of this page I see "Serendipity Forums" - and on some pages I just saw "board.s9y.org" - but I can't reproduce it atm - I just have to guess that the "official title" of the forums once was "Serendipity [s9y] Forums" and that's where the entries in the Google search results come from.

I don't think there's any reasonable way to fix this for future hits (board.s9y.org is less descriptive, very technical and not so much shorter...), but there's definitely no way to fix this for the descriptions in Google's search index *now*.

Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:40 pm
by dhm
Huh? Didn't realize that the actual titles in the forum are different (or were they changed lately?).

Yes, Google still has the old ones indexed - so it's only a matter of time.

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 12:07 am
by winkiller
I wouldn't bet a huge sum of money, but I think it's been at least a year.
So not sure if it ever will change...

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 1:45 pm
by garvinhicking
Hi!

Jannis recently changed the titles...

Regards,
Garvin