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Stack Exchange started a while ago to add the most-used tag at the front of the HTML title to prevent scrapers from being ranked higher on Google than the SE site itself.

This makes a lot of sense for Stack Overflow, where the most important search term is often the programming language, and this search term is very often only present in form of a tag, and completely omitted in the actual question title. So you get titles like

python - How do I do X?

This addition improves SEO a lot as the programming language is an important search term most of the time, and it is often omitted in the question titles. The same goes for game names on Gaming.SE, where adding the tag to the title is critical for SEO.

But is the basic assumption behind this feature valid on other SE sites as well? Do the question titles regularly omit important search terms that are present only in tags?

In my observation, adding the tag in front of the title doesn't help for many other SE sites. I did have a look at the most popular search terms that were used to find questions on Skeptics.SE, and I didn't find a single one where the search term was in the tag.

I strongly doubt that adding the tag to the title helps the SEO for questions on SE sites except SO and Gaming. And adding a tag that isn't an important search term does cause some harm:

  • Google cuts off the title after around 70 characters, a long tag in front significantly reduces the space dedicated to the actual question in search results
  • The tag occupies the most valuable spot of the title, in many cases this valuable space would be better used by the actual question title

Is my perception accurate that this feature might be doing more harm than good on many sites? Should this feature maybe be enabled on a per-site basis, instead of globally?

Here's one example where the tag lead to the question being cuts off:

enter image description here

The tag is perfectly fine, but it is not a search term people would use to find the question. And the wasted space in the beginning leads to the title being cut off early.

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    This really reads like it should go to webmasters.
    – casperOne
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 12:37
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    I've definitely found it annoying and/or detrimental on other sites (such as Programmers). At least being able to control which tag gets to represent the question would be an improvement.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:37
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    If the most "popular" tag on a question is effectively meaningless in the title (whether as a prefix or worked in "organically"), you might want to re-think your tagging scheme. Funny enough, since you used them as an example: gaming had a major issue with this not too long ago, in that their most-used tags weren't the names of games - they were generic things like "strategy".
    – Shog9
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:40
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    @Shog9 Sometimes it's just an issue of a valid tag that has a lower importance to the question being more popular than the "primary" question tag. I'll have to hunt for a representative example.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:42
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    @Shog9 It's often not meaningless, but also not an important search term. E.g. on Skeptics it will often be something like [medical-science], [biology] or [economics]. Those tags are perfectly fine for categorizing content, but they are just not the terms people are using in their searches.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:43
  • Specific examples would help here :)
    – Shog9
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:45
  • @Shog9 I've added an example where I think the current behaviour is harmful.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:52
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    @Shog9 the problem was those non-primary tags still were helpful, but they weren't primary. That's where marking a primary tag would help.
    – Zelda
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 17:07
  • «Google cuts off the title after around 70 characters,» Yeah, Google really needs to go back to not doing that. It's f'ing ridiculous.
    – jscs
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 17:13
  • On boardgames I think prepending the tag (usually the game) to the title is positive, for similar reasons to Gaming. Usually the human-readable question title is clearer, and less artificial without the game specified. But we do have the problem with 'strategy', just like Gaming did...
    – ire_and_curses
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 22:51
  • @shog actually I'd argue that this "problem" is rather specific to skeptics because everything is on topic there.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 3:40

5 Answers 5

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Worth noting that you (as an author or editor) do have some control over this:

  1. You get to pick which tags are used. This is fairly obvious, but if you're picking a tag that's incongruous with the title, you might want to pick a different one.

  2. If you work the tag into the title "organically", it won't get prefixed. So, "How do I do X in Python?" won't have "Python - " prepended to it. So if you're just looking to put something more important near the start of the title, use this method to enforce it.

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    On nearly all Skeptics questions I'd prefer to not put any tag at all in front. We just don't leave out important search terms in our titles like SO does, the tags don't provide any benefit even if they fit reasonably well to the question.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 16:46
  • Regarding your point #1: I don't get to pick the Tags if I deliberately chose only one, and someone else edits the question to include one of the most popular tags on the site (Buddhism, personal-practice Tag more popular than sangha tag, which is the one I chose). What do I do, edit it back out again?
    – user291305
    Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 20:45
  • Regarding point #2, the word Sangha is in the wording of my title (near the end) but "personal-practice-" is still stuck on the front. Have you tried your suggestions?
    – user291305
    Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 20:47
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I agree that putting the tag in the front of the title is less than ideal.

In particular, I feel this pain when I have a bunch of browser tabs open to SE questions (which is almost always). Due to the prepended tags, most of them look the same and I have to click through them all to find the specific one I want, since all I can see in the tab title is the tag. Typically, the start of the question titles is different enough that I can tell them apart, but if all I see is the tag, then I'm stuck.

Perhaps a JavaScript solution is the answer to this particular aspect of the problem: Just remove the front tag from the page title on page-load. This leaves it there for SEO purposes and gets it out of the way for the tab-fanatic users like me.

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    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71951/…
    – Yi Jiang
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 18:42
  • I see the solution, but I don't understand it. Am I editing something in to the Question itself, so that it will suppress the Tag in the Title for everyone? Or just in my browser so it only affects me? Doing it only for myself is pretty silly. I am trying to promote a new Tag. Almost any other tag on the site will out-rank it. Not useful!
    – user291305
    Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 20:49
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Gaming is going to have a serious problem if this happens; like SO we don't like to put tags in the title, so a billion questions aren't titled "How do I eat babies in Mass Effect?" Gaming's SEO would be butchered, and I don't honestly see much value in dropping it from other sites either.

Leaving the tags in the title is just generally problematic, for example on User Experience we have piles of Website-design questions but no one needs or wants Website Design: to prefix all those questions.

As for the title getting cut off...so what? Titles get cut off in Google search results. They're going to get cut off without the tag. Google highlights the bits that match your search so the cut off isn't significant. Saving an average of ~10 characters in the title won't help most people in most cases, but dropping the tag can harm scanability of our results in Google and harms the general SEO as well.

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    Gaming is one of the two explicit exceptions I made in my post where this behaviour should definitely stay.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 17:08
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    @Fabian suddenly needing to make exceptions left and right for a behavior that doesn't seem to harm all the other sites anyway seems like a bad idea. Having to put the primary tag in the title on all those other sites for SEO seems like an even worse idea.
    – Zelda
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 17:10
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I have a compromise to propose.

It seems that adding the tag in can be helpful for SEO on many sites. Unfortunately, it detracts from user experience for other sites.

So, how about moving it to the end?

This way, we still get that important SEO juice, while letting more of the question title be seen when it gets cropped (such as in search results, or tab labels).

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    The common practice of major search engines is to treat words near the beginning of the title more important AFAIK.
    – 把友情留在无盐
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 14:26
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How about we allow the person writing the Question to specify the most important Tag... if they WANT to do so? What is wrong with that idea? If I am trying to introduce a new Tag on a site with lots of common and popular ones (Buddhism) how else can I do it?

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  • Also, you should remove the feature-request tag if questions asking for sensible new features will be soundly voted down. Just make it clear that you do not want any improvements, thank you!
    – user291305
    Commented Jul 24, 2015 at 12:24
  • Some features are rejected by the community, some by the devs; you can't really expect them to simply hand over all creative control to whoever showed up to Meta that day. And the number of feature-requests implemented, even nowadays, is non-zero. Still, I do sympathize with the feeling of frustration when a good suggestion is rejected for seemingly insufficient reasons.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 21:48
  • I guess there were previous comments, but deleted before I can read them. I totally don't understand what the discussion is head to here. @NathanTuggy
    – 把友情留在无盐
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 14:33
  • I believe it is a good idea, and worth asking a dedicated question on meta, for letting the community decide what tag to appear in page title.
    – 把友情留在无盐
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 14:50
  • @soubunmei: As far as I know, there were no other comments here. no comprende was just complaining about the existence of feature-request, given that not all questions with that tag are accepted into the software. There already is a dedicated feature-request for blacklisting tags from showing up in titles.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 18:44
  • @NathanTuggy as best I recall, I got several downvotes very soon after posting my Answer. Either that, or it happened on another feature-request type thing. I no longer remember.
    – user291305
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 21:25
  • What do you mean by "introduce a new Tag on a site… common and popular…"? How is it related to our discussion?
    – 把友情留在无盐
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 4:42
  • And "how else can I do it", what exactly do you want to do in the first place?
    – 把友情留在无盐
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 4:43
  • @soubunmei Well, I wanted to be able to choose which tag would go on the title, if the tagging could not be eliminated. When I was creating a new tag that I wanted to make visible, I wanted to be able to choose that tag to appear in the title. A lost cause I think.
    – user291305
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 0:23

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