Optimizing Algorithmically

How Best to Optimize thousands of titles?

[Nick_W]

So,

You've tens of thousands of titles that need optimizing, what do you do?

• Truncate each title to 50 chars
  
• Snip out product serial numbers
  
• Snip out anything in (parenthesis)

What else could you do programmatically?

Nick

[trillianjedi]

Stripping out everything after a "-" would work well on most of our titles.

Possibly, depending on your site, everything after a ":" also.

You could do that dependant on string length. So do two passes. First pass looks at the string length of the title. If it exceeds X characters, then look for a ":" or a "-" and truncate from there.

Second pass, if the length is still > X then truncate down to 60.

As you know well though Nick, those titles are important. Whether or not you want to trust their editing to a program, is another matter.

TJ

[killroy]

stemming and using gramatical transfoirmations would work too. If your titles ahve structure you could regex the hell out of them and make them better too.

SN

[Nick_W]

Thanks Guys.

I can do some stuff to the content algorithmicaly too: Like adding the word 'buy' to the page if it doesn't exist etc...

>titles
They sure are important but I estimate I've got about 40-60K of them and just don't have that much time ;) Some do indeed fall foul of the regex's but most are improved.

Looking at optimization on a mass scale is quite fun :)

Nick