1095437 - Decouple h1 and title fields of documents to improve SEO, search links, and browser tab titles

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, enhancement)

Description

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
==================================================================================
Currently, the provided <h1> of documents is also the <title> of the page. I am proposing to have two fields for each, so that you are able to set them independent from each other. They could still default to being the same when creating new docs (and for all existing docs), but there are often cases where we need to tweak this.

What problems would this solve?
===============================
* Open several tabs of e.g. the CanvasRenderingContext2D interface for any other MDN page with a rather long name.
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRenderingContext2D.font). You can't really see which tab opened which reference page. This is bad practice. If I open the w3schools page http://www.w3schools.com/tags/canvas_font.asp, the title is more clear and I find the tab I want quickly.

* I could just set the h1 to "Canvas font", but as this is a reference page we want to be technically correct, also quicklinks use the current title etc.

* SEO. Being able to set a more optimized title can possibly improve our SEO.

* Breadcrumbs. The h1 is also used in our breadcrumbs. I am unsure if we want to use the h1 there or the title, if we do the split.

Who would use this?
===================
* MDN readers
* Tabs in the Browser
* SEO

What would users see?
=====================
A more useful <title>

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
Better SEO ranking, better UX.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

Adding a reference to the canvas doc project I am currently working on, as we have identified a rather bad ranking there, although we are delivering good (better) content for that topic already.

Comment 2

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

I am wondering if we could move the interface in titles automatically as it seems like we already do some tweaks to <title>. (I assume that titles with a dot (".") are only used for reference articles, and that we would only tweak if there is a dot, but we should verify that assumption).

So, maybe:

<h1>WebGLRenderingContext.drawArrays()</h1>
<title>drawArrays() - WebGLRenderingContext - Web APIs | MDN</title>

However, I am not sure about the JS reference, where this indicates prototype vs. static, too.

<h1>Promise.prototype.catch()</h1>
<title>Promise.prototype.catch() - JavaScript | MDN</title>

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.