Dynamic titles too long?

Client Joined: Dec 04, 2004 Posts: 757

Hello all, I have had a problem in the last version of RN where the Dynamic titles are very long? basically the title includes the post text from the page also? I have looked around the other forums with no joy Crying or Very sad

I have just upgraded to the latest RN thinking that might fix it but still no joy sob sob
thanks for any help
mrix

Regular Joined: Feb 18, 2006 Posts: 99

try going into your includes folder and find the file called dynamic_titles.php

Change this line near the top

Code:

$text_size = 255;  //Where descriptive text is used such as forum post text, you may wish to limit its size

change 255 to a smaller number.

I hope that is what you were asking.

registered · Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 7:11 pm

mrix, actually, that is by design. The whole point of Dynamic Titles is not for usability but for Search Engine optimization. I put that "limiter" in there just in case find issues with some search engines, but I submit to you that you are defeating the purpose by reducing the size...

The point is to get a good chunk of your up-front content (where hopefully most of your keywords will be found) in the actual page title itself. The page title is very key for search engine indexing. The more relevant the content there the better.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 12:21 am

Yes I can understand what you are saying but it can also be damaging for some search engines if the title is too big etc. The are hundreds of seo sites out there explaining to keep the title size down.?
Cheers
mrix

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 6:08 am

Quote:

The are hundreds of seo sites out there explaining to keep the title size down.?

Can you please point me to a few of these because I based this work off some early work by storebuilder who, in my opinion, at the time, was considered an expert in this. I'd like to research this more.

Thanks.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 9:24 am

I have used websites like this one http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/ there are many like it around and if the title is too long they explain that it should be a certain length etc.
I have tried a few meta tag site checkers like this I believe they are ripe on the net.
Saying that since my post I was interested to read up a bit more on this subject and I have read that most search engines trunkcate the title if too long anyway... but I have read also that smaller titles are better in some forums.
Also from what I have read its very hard to say if a title is long it does have any negative effect at all.

Cheers
mrix

registered · Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 6:40 pm

I know Google recommends no more than 80 characters for the Title tag.

registered · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6437

There are recommendations by several SEO experts (loosely defined) and by search engines, but I'm not aware of any penalties imposed by the search engine for exceeding the maximum length (as there seem to have been for keyword spamming at one time, though most search engines ignore META keywords now). The consensus is that those search engines that use a limit simply truncate at the maximum length, so you might hurt yourself by having an important keyword AFTER the maximum length.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 6:59 am

kguske, I started my research on this yesterday a bit and others are in agreement that truncation is all that happens. Others are also in agreement that keywords in the page title is a good thing, but NOT keyword stuffing (which I know you are not advocating, but just wanted to make that clear here).

I will post back my final research summary once I am done. I already know that I will have to tweak DT, but I want to take in more research before I do.

Just also want to remind everyone who reads this thread that the point of DT is for SE optimization and readability, especially in browser bookmarks, may have to suffer a little bit, but I'll still keep that use model in mind.