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<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<title>Blue Widgets at WidgetPalace</title>
</body>
</html>
I know that it is necessary for the title to be inside the head for the page to validate. However, this would involve way too much custom work to implement with our current system.
Does anyone know if the search engine spiders will still index these pages using the Title outside the <head> tags? Would there be a dramatic difference in rankings?
Thanks,
pr0d
We have a site using a CMS that will not allow us to put dynamic data in the title tag within the <head> tags.
It may be time to research a new CMS or have the developers of the CMS address this issue pronto. The <title> element is one of the most important elements of a page.
However, it is possible to add a custom tag called <title> within the <body> of our page. For example:
This is not valid markup.
I know that it is necessary for the title to be inside the head for the page to validate. However, this would involve way too much custom work to implement with our current system.
Unfortunately you are going to have to bite the bullet and do the custom work so you can implement the <title> element where it is supposed to be, inside the <head></head> elements.
Does anyone know if the search engine spiders will still index these pages using the Title outside the <head> tags? Would there be a dramatic difference in rankings?
No they won't be able to index a page title if the page title is not within the <title> element which belongs inbetween the <head></head> elements.
Since Internet Exporer and Firefox both display the title tag even when the title is outside the <head>.
Hmmm, now you have me wondering. I have never ever seen the <title> element outside of the <head></head> elements. And, all of the documentation I've read from the authoritative resources, mainly the W3C state that the <title> element should be in the <head></head>.
Every HTML document must have a TITLE element in the HEAD section.
The HEAD element contains information about the current document, such as its title, keywords that may be useful to search engines, and other data that is not considered document content. User agents do not generally render elements that appear in the HEAD as content. They may, however, make information in the HEAD available to users through other mechanisms.
<head></head><body></body></title><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html lang="en">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<!-- end of your non-editable zone -->
[b]<title>Your title here</title>[/b]
<p>your content here...</p>
</html>The above should validate fine.
<head>
<title>Title 3</title> *** This is what will show as the title in browsers and search engines
</head>
<head>
<title>Title 2</title> *** This is what the CMS Generates
</head>
<head>
<title>Title 1</title> *** This is the main title of the site
</head>
So, while it doesn't validate, every search engine indexes the pages properly and uses the first title tag and ignores the rest. So having more than 1 title tag doesn't seem to impact anything. They just load top down with the first title in the code being the one used.
Do you want to take the chance that maybe some spider will see all three <title> elements and raise a flag?
So I just did a few mods to a website and then indexed it with my web spider.
Our search engine spider managed to understand it in one out of three goes.
So from my perspective it would be worth doing the extra work just to make sure that all is well because if it's missed at around 33% of the time it's not worth the risk..
Dave A
