Auto generation of page titles

dev
1

Hi guys,

I am looking for a solution to generate automatically page titles for a very large customer site (over 13000 URLs)
Is there an existing plugin or a script with such feature that I could suggest to my client?

Thanks for your help

2

Running version 7.0.1 of FarCry Core

3

By “page titles” do you mean:

  • the friendly url
  • the <title>my page title</title> tag
  • some sort of page identity like an <h1>Page Title</h1> tag in the body content
  • all of the above

When you say “generate automatically page titles”, is this from existing content items in your database? What properties exist in this content type?

4

I mean the <title>my page title</title> tag

Auto-generated based on the exisiting H1 or sub-headings (H2, H3, H4…) if the H1 is missing. Or just the content if there is no headings on the page.

Site involved is http://www.taxinstitute.com.au

5

Ideally no longer than 55 characters and no shorter than 30 characters…

6

Usually the <title>my page title</title> is outputted based on the “label” property of the object and the name of the site. e.g. “My Page Title - My Company” – this would be dynamically when the page is rendered, so the complete literal string “My Page Title - My Company” isn’t actually stored anywhere.

What is your purpose of trying to “generate” the page titles? Are you trying to update them somehow so that they display differently on the site, or are you trying to generate some type of file that is going to be used elsewhere?

Perhaps you can give us some example URLs of pages that need to be “fixed”?

1 Like
7

Most page titles are duplicated and too long. My client would like to find a solution to solve both of these issues

8

Usually the <h1> on the page is the “Title” of the object, so there’s a high probability that it’s already being used as the HTML <title> tag. If the titles are too long, the objects might need to be edited and saved – truncating them to X characters could potentially be worse for SEO I think.

9

OK thanks for this information. I need to gather more data to see which URLs are affected by the length and duplication issues. I ll complete my demand as soon as I have these data :smile:

10

Hi guys,

I have more details about the issues that I need to solve.

The length of the page is actually not a big issue. However the duplicate titles issue needs a solution.
Using Screaming Frog crawler we have identified the duplicated page titles.

Would it be possible to write a piece of script that would identify the duplicate page titles and then change them dynamically adding the publication date for example and the author name if the duplicate pages involved were published the same day.

I give you as an example 3 different sets of URLs with duplicated title tags:

SET #1 (Page Title:Withholding tax update - The Tax Institute)

http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/4F695C0D-D565-5B5B-E4582E081B245F27
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-papers/withholding-tax-update
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-presentations/withholding-tax-update

SET #2 (Page Title:Winding up solvent companies - The Tax Institute)

http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/4FF90975-D565-5B5B-EE7F22E09BA2757D
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/go/seminar-and-conventions/winding-up-solvent-companies
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-papers/winding-up-solvent-companies
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-presentations/winding-up-solvent-companies

SET #3 (Page Title:Winding Up Business Structures - The Tax Institute)

http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/convention-papers/winding-up-business-structures
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/convention-presentation/winding-up-business-structures
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-papers/winding-up-business-structures
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-papers/winding-up-business-structures2
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-papers/winding-up-business-structures4
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-presentations/winding-up-business-structures1

Thanks for your help and your time

11

Yes, you could solve this a couple of different ways.

You could differentiate the titles for these…

http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-papers/withholding-tax-update
http://www.taxinstitute.com.au/seminar-presentations/withholding-tax-update

… by adding “(Seminar Papers)” or “(Seminar Presentations)” to the page title when it’s dynamically generated for the <title>. Or any other string that you like such as the date and author name, etc. This would assume that you wanted to always do that for these particular content types (whether or not there are duplicates).

Or you could write a script to update the label in the DB for all records in those content types, but this might also affect the <h1> that appears on the page, so that might not be the desired effect you’re after. In that case, there may be an SEO title property that could be set in the DB (the dmHTML content type works this way an an example) but it would depend on which content types have implemented it, and then it would need to be used appropriately when the <title> is generated and outputted.

12

In that case, there may be an SEO title property that could be set in the DB (the dmHTML content type works this way an an example) but it would depend on which content types have implemented it, and then it would need to be used appropriately when the <title> is generated and outputted.

13

This solution might be what my client needs.

Would you be able to put that together Justin? Can you send me a quote over?