SEO and "& # 44 ;" in the title

[Jenny]

I am working closely with a client who has employed a guy to suggest SEO etc.. He is saying to remove "& # 44 ;" (had to space it out to show you what I mean) in the site title meta tag but as actinic generates this instead of comma's what do other people do. The site changes regularly so I don't want to hard code every page, besides I would never remember where I am at.
Any thoughts
Thanks
Jenny

[Mike Hughes]

Take out the commas from the title. They're just wasted there.

Mike

[Jenny]

Mike,
thanks however as the client wants commas any ideas? Are they really a problem ie the coded version of "& # 44 ;" (with out the quotes and spaces)
Jenny

[Mike Hughes]

It won't be a problem for the search engines as they'll know what they're seeing and ignore it. A bigger problem for me is that if there's a comma then his title is probably too long and will weaken the impact of any keywords he has in it. I'm sure his SEO advisor has already told him this.

At the end of the day it's up to him. The search engines will just take whatever you give them.

Mike

[jont]

Jenny - is the SEO saying to remove and replace or just remove? May be how the SEO is phrasing it

[Jenny]

SEO guy is saying to replay the html for comma with actual commas but as actinic generates the code I can't
Jenny

[Mike Hughes]

You can fix it by hard coding the title for that page, but that's up to you and the client.

The search engines won't care what they see (and ignore commas and the equivalent anyway for SERPS), the only issue I can see is the way the title is displayed in the SERPS.

If you do a search on google for this page, what does the title show? Does it show a comma or the coded version. If it's the comma then I can't see what the problem is but if it's the coded equivalent then I'd agree that it should be changed as it could confuse the searcher.

Mike

[webyourbusiness]

olderscot,

one of my biggest issues with SEO work on an actinic store these days is that you have to do a LOT of custom templates if you want more control over the meta content - I'd like to see an SEO advanced button on brochure pages AND actinic sections, which give your ultimate control over the whole meta content section - with the ability to place comments, SSI calls and have it actinic parsed for NETQUOTEVARs as well..

It would be nice as we could then send a client a new TXT file and tell them to copy it all and paste it into the XXX brochure page meta section...

What says everyone? Wouldn't that add a LOT more flexibility than our current description and keywords options?

Can we get a yes from those at the sharp end?

regards

Greg

[Jenny]

Also I have been asked to change all the page names, many were generated by actinic and replace the "_" with "-".
Does this mean that the actinic names are not friendly enough?
Thanks
Jenny

[garyhay]

Jenny

The ask if they mean Page Names "thisansthat.html" or Page Titles "Online Catalog selling this and that".

Sounds like an SEO going through the motions. Ask what they think about alt tags?

[DaveT]

Hi Jenny

I understand this was fixed in 7.02 or 03 but I used to have all "-" in the page names. In V7 they automatically converted those hyphens to underscores which was a severe setback as Google saw the pages as new pages. Only just getting the PR back.

Anyway you could use an Access query to replace underscores with hyphens now that Actinic won't overwrite them:

Copy this into a new query in Access under the SQL view:

UPDATE [Catalog section] SET [Catalog section].sPageName = Replace([Catalog section]![sPageName],"_","-");

This is quicker than doing 1000 sections manually.

[webyourbusiness]

DaveT,

setup your .htaccess for 301 redirect - names changed to _ names... 5-10 minutes work would have prevented you losing ANY PR.

regards

Greg

[DaveT]

Well yes I did that too of course. Actually I didn't lose that much PR but that's not the point.

[Mike Hughes]

There are pro's and cons to hyphens versus underscores. As gary says, Google treats them differently in that a hyphen is definitely creates a word delimited but an underscore isn't.

i.e. in google, "Sport-shoe-bags" would rank for each of the 3 words and all three combined. "Sport_shoe_bags" would also score for each of the 3 words but also for "Sports" as Google doesn't consider the underscore to end the word and allows them to run together.

Personally, I wouldn't change an existing website as it isn't that important and you'll lose any existing links to the old pages (including bookmarks etc) unless you put a whole load of 301 redirects into an htaccess file.


Mike

PS. I'm not sure I understood webyourbusiness' suggestion but anything that gives experts more control over the website is a good idea. Actinic needs to be automatic and easy to use for everyone, but also needs to provide full control over any aspects you want to change.

[garyhay]

on This the page name is "Tulipes_5100.html" but the title is "My Company Tulipes 5100" This was built with version 7.0.1 so I fail to see where a page name can hamper a page rank as (well i understood it to be) it's the title that the search engine looks at