Last post 12 hours 33 min ago

Posts last week 141

Average response time last week 4 hours 42 min

All time posts 67805

All time tickets 10478

All time avg. posts per day 21

Helpdesk is open from Monday through Friday CET

Please create an (free) account to post any question in the support area.

Please check the development versions area. Look at the changelog, maybe your specific problem has been resolved already!

All tickets are private and they cannot be viewed by anyone. We have made public only a few tickets that we found helpful, after removing private information from them.

#8839 – Is 4SEO doing anything for Meta Title?

Posted in ‘4SEO’

This is a public ticket. Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Tuesday, 14 June 2022 15:27 UTC

TheSDHotel

Is 4SEO doing anything for Meta Title?

I'm mostly referring to an equivalent/similar setting as this from sh404sef:
https://i.imgur.com/oxks5B2.png
("Show category in title")

I couldn't find any option for this in 4SEO.

I feel like this is an important option that should be there.

I think in the past we also had a chat and an idea came up to potentially make this a rule as well. Meaning you could choose in what categories you want the category to be added to the title, and in which categories you don't want it. That could also be a way to go about it.

But if the rule thing is too advanced/complicated/or planned for later, I think that until then, at least a generic (global) setting should be implemented.

Tuesday, 14 June 2022 15:35 UTC

TheSDHotel

Oh, one more thing:

For Page Title, sh404sef also had these settings:
https://i.imgur.com/sVL5kbH.png

Tuesday, 14 June 2022 16:08 UTC

wb_weeblr

Nope, 4SEO is not rewriting titles at all. May happen in the future, not sure yet under which form, will likely have tags rather than dedicated settings. Or maybe not.

The "category" settings and likely the others will probably not happen. Appending categories was the default behavior in sh404SEF and it's one of the patterns that were identified as triggering title rewrites (one of the big SEO topics of last years) so i'm not too keen on favoring that, at least for now.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Wednesday, 15 June 2022 15:11 UTC

TheSDHotel

I see, yeah I know exactly what you mean. I also had a lot of experience with "dealing" with Google rewriting titles in the past year.

In my experience and tests, I concluded that having ONE category appended to the title is the "happy medium" and causes pretty much no rewrites on the part of Google, as they don't have other stuff to shuffle around if it's just one category added.

On a lot of sites, that is very useful, because in case of "products-like" articles, the titles may be very short (eg. 20 characters or less), and then you have no context to indicate what category it is.

Eg. in case of vehicles. You need something like:

Banshee | GTA 5 Vehicles

Otherwise you end up with just:

Banshee

which it tells nothing about what it is. And you can't expect people to manually customize page titles for each of the hundreds/thousands of products pages one by one.

This is just an example but I'm sure there would be many more cases in many more sites. So I do suggest to add at least the option to append ONE category to the article title (not the whole category tree), something like:

Show category in title:
- None
- Top one only
- Last one only

Or maybe with tags like you said if you want more flexibility (but I'm not sure that's needed)

Wednesday, 15 June 2022 15:21 UTC

wb_weeblr

Well, if you do this, it's the same amount of work to bring back the same options as before. So the choice is just if, how and when to do it.

And you can't expect people to manually customize page titles for each of the hundreds/thousands of products pages one by one.

Honestly, my take over the last couple of years of this is now to just not worry about titles (and even less about description). The expected benefits are so small...

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Wednesday, 15 June 2022 18:46 UTC

TheSDHotel

As far as I know titles are still pretty important, but who knows with all the changes that Google keeps making.

Anyway, maybe add it to your tracker and see what to do about it in the future :)

Thursday, 16 June 2022 07:22 UTC

wb_weeblr

It's been really minor in terms of ranking, and for a long time already. The only reason it's been advised to really work on them is prominence in SERP - and even that is going away in many cases, with title rewriting. So...

When that happens in 4SEO, it'll be to please users to be honest, not because it's a significant SEO feature.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Thursday, 16 June 2022 07:38 UTC

TheSDHotel

Yeah, I see. I expect that will be a requested feature as I think having a category appended to a title would be useful to many.

If it won't end up in the extension, I guess I'll code my own solution in a template override (super easy anyway).

Thursday, 16 June 2022 07:50 UTC

wb_weeblr

Sure, here is something to help you. There's of course a hook for that:

$hooks->add(
	'forseo_request_info',
	function ($expandedVariables) {

        $appendedString = ' - something';
		$expandedVariables['page_title'] = $expandedVariables['page_title'] . $appendString;
		
		return $expandedVariables;
	}
);

From there, you can compute your appended string based on the current input variable or however you like. (there are more variables you can change here, the description, etc)

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Thursday, 16 June 2022 07:51 UTC

TheSDHotel

Sweet, thanks :)

Thursday, 16 June 2022 08:27 UTC

wb_weeblr

You're welcome! Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

This ticket is closed, therefore read-only. You can no longer reply to it. If you need to provide more information, please open a new ticket and mention this ticket's number.