Title Junk: Solve it with Javascript

There is some back and forth by John Gruber and others, about HTML <title> tags, with Gruber complaining (and rightly so) that for SEO reasons the titles are filled up with junk having little to do with the real page content.

The writers of cam.ly suggest to use the SEO title in the HTML and have something proper be displayed in Google by using an OpenSearch description. But this still doesn’t solve the problem of bloated window titles and bookmarks.

So my solution to that: use JavaScript. If you want to satisfy your readers with a good title and present a nice title to Google, simply set the title to something nice after the page has loaded with JavaScript:


document.title = "Title Junk: Solve it with JavaScript";

Everyone happy. Except those who have JavaScript disabled maybe.

I have also created a tiny WordPress plugin that does just that: title-junk.zip

Discussion on Hacker News

Posted in Web

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