Closed Bug 1423719 Opened 7 years ago Closed 6 years ago

Stop adding " | MDN" to the ends of page <title>s

Categories

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, enhancement, P2)

Product:
developer.mozilla.org Graveyard
Component:
Wiki pages
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: sheppy, Unassigned)

Details

(Keywords: in-triage, Whiteboard: [lod:1][points:2]) 

According to our SEO contractor, adding " | MDN" to the ends of our titles is not actually helpful for SEO purposes, and in fact can be harmful in that it takes away space we could be using for more helpful content. Please remove the code that adds this to the titles of pages.
Will this impact very common search queries like "array slice mdn" or "css grid mdn"?
Flags: needinfo?(eshepherd)
Keywords: in-triage
Priority: -- → P2
I need to research level of effort.
Flags: needinfo?(jwhitlock)
I think Google will not rank developer.mozilla.org as highly for "array slice mdn" as it did in the past.

This is done in one page, and tested in many places. If we decide to do it, it should be an hour or two of work.
Flags: needinfo?(jwhitlock)
Whiteboard: [lod:1][points:2]
(In reply to Florian Scholz [:fscholz] (MDN) from comment #1)
> Will this impact very common search queries like "array slice mdn" or "css
> grid mdn"?

Good question. Nilaye said that including site identification in the title is unnecessary and steals space we could be using for more useful information, but I don't know if he considered the fact that people expressly Google "array slice mdn".

Would it be possible to do a test run where we only change this on a few pages and see what if any impact it has before doing it globally?
Flags: needinfo?(eshepherd)
My estimate is based on removing this across the site. It will be more code to do it on a subset of pages. What pages do you want in the test group?
Flags: needinfo?(eshepherd)
This will be done as an SEO experiment that will be either/or -- either all pages or none.
Flags: needinfo?(eshepherd)
The PR has been opened in https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/pull/4926

Though this is not an SEO issue according to the SEO expert

> Talking to our SEO expert, this is not something that we should go forward with. While very long suffixes are problematic, 
> the short 3 letter MDN one is apparently not and can help with branding. Sorry for the flip flopping and the unnecessary work > caused by this.
> quoted from: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/pull/4926#issuecomment-416917740

@Kadir: I believe this can be closed then.
Flags: needinfo?(a.topal)
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 6 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(a.topal)
Resolution: --- → INVALID
Product: developer.mozilla.org → developer.mozilla.org Graveyard
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