Brand Name Warning Nag

  • Resolved belamer

    (@belamer)


    2 years ago

    New user here coming from Genesis Studio Press with native SEO. Almost all my content is PAGES and not POSTS. Using TSF I find it counterintuitive to heed the advice “It’s crucial to remember that you should—rather, you must—brand your titles.”

    I brand only my Home Page and a couple other pages. I let Google add the brand which is my URL, if it sees fit in its results.

    Doing research, I see where others hew contrary to TSF’s practice, to wit:

    “If you have found a great business name and you are interested in promoting it, make sure you include it on your brand-driven pages, like “About us”, blog Home page, Contact page, etc.

    “But think twice before including your name on all pages of your site. It will make your titles longer and may force Google to truncate them in search results or even modify it.

    “That being said, if you notice Google changing a lot of your titles, consider removing the brand name from them. That’s the fastest way to make your title tags shorter.”

    Now TSF has a feature to disable the automated brand name everywhere. But, and here is the rub, when creating a new page comes the nag to brand the page. And looking at a few hundred pages and posts, TSF flags them with the warning “Title: Not Branded”. I would like for TSF to rethink this approach, or perhaps add an extension to make these warnings go away permanently.

    Having said that, I will purchase the paid version as I think TSF is about the best I can find having tested the others. I like its speed, conservative approach and the attitude of the developer.

    • This topic was modified 2 years ago by belamer.
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  • Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Hello!

    First, I want to thank you for supporting us! ?? I’m not sure what you like about my attitude, but I’ll take it ?? Cheers!

    Getting right to it: Blogging Wizard is no authority in SEO; still, their findings aren’t incorrect, albeit anecdotal. Google is the only true authority, and they tell everyone to brand their titles, or they will (eventually): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link.

    The problem is that once your site structure becomes known to Google, they will learn the site title and paste it after every other title missing one. This will ruin your titles with odd truncations and make the pixel counter’s prediction incorrect.

    Take, for example, this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/yzwv3n/this_cute_little_guy/.

    Its title tag displays: 

    <title>This cute little guy : aww</title>

    On Google Search, we can find that specific page quickly by searching for:
    site:https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/yzwv3n/this_cute_little_guy/.

    Then, you’ll see the title Google outputs, with - Reddit appended: 

    This cute little guy : r/aww - Reddit

    It may differ per country, per site, per page of a site, and even per Google user. Sometimes, even per day. Google is experimenting with this, and all we can do is abide by their rules, or we’d have to update the plugin 100 times a day. They used to paste the site title to every page, but now they seem to do so less often.

    For a very good reason, Google won’t give us any data on their inner workings. Because if they shared how they work, people could (and will) exploit their search engines. So, they work in secret, and we are left to listen to their (vague) guidelines.

    Now, we use the “unknown state” in the SEO Bar to depict missing branding: Unknown colors in blue, which means that there is no error/warning, but something isn’t as intended for SEO; still, you probably understand what you are doing. Red indicates a mistake you should fix, yellow is a slight warning (which you may ignore), and green means everything’s OK.

    In the SEO Bar, errors will always overwrite warnings (and halt further processing of the item), and warnings will always overwrite the “unknown state.” This means a blue-colored SEO Bar item won’t ever conceal something more drastic and can safely be dismissed.

    Unfortunately, there is no easy way to remove the branding check from the SEO Bar. I could provide you with a filter snippet, but it might cause issues in a future update. It’d look something like the one at the bottom here, but then removing instead of adding. Still, let me know if you’d like such a snippet.

    Thread Starter belamer

    (@belamer)

    Thank you for your insight.

    In our application, and this may well be the case for others, inserting the brand in the title will not work as it would be repetitious as the brand is the domain itself. We have tested and seen almost immediate, not so nice results. TSF’s reminder about not setting site title I can ignore and have got used to it, no need for any filter but thanks.

    I’ve gone ahead and purchased the license for 4 years after carefully reviewing and testing other SEO plugins.

    Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Cheers! And thanks for supporting this project ??

    The workaround for the warning will be a bit spotty, so I’m glad you don’t need it now. But I can improve this in a future update. I submitted a new issue about this to allow a simple filter to remove an unwanted check (or submit a new check with higher priority): https://github.com/sybrew/the-seo-framework/issues/613.

    Thank you for the review, too! Have a blessed weekend!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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