Question Page Titles for Search Engine Optimization

Question

When asking a question, the first tag gets prepended to the title of a question page. I will be using a recent question of mine as an example.

Question Title

I originally had this as the title of my question:

Heat vision goggles in The Expendables

Question Tags

• action

I could not add the "the-expendables" tag because it was not created yet at the time I asked my question.

Page Title

So the title of my question was:

action - Heat vision goggles in The Expendables - Movies & TV Stack Exchange

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My question was then edited to the following:

Question Title

What kind of heat vision goggles?

Question Tags

• action
• the-expendables

Page Title

action - What kind of heat vision goggles? - Movies & TV Stack Exchange

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I went to edit the tag ordering so that "the-expendables" was before "action" so that it would be "the expendables - What kind of heat vision goggles? - Movies & TV Stack Exchange" as the page title. This would be better for search engines to find. But when I saved my edit the ordering of the tags was the same and the title did not change.

I decided to delete the "action" tag, and that change did change the title.

Would it be better to remove relevant tags or to add the movie title back to the question title so that the question page is ranked higher for relevant queries in search engines? If neither of those are preferred solutions, I would like to request the feature of being able to better manually rearrange question tags.

Answer 1

You are going to have to take your request about manual ordering of tags to Meta Stackoverflow, as the same platform is used throughout StackExchange. As you can see from this question tags are shown in order of their popularity in the site as a whole.

As for the page title ... its preferred to keep the movie or TV show title out of the question title. The movie title should appear in the tags, which are shown in all views of the question. This is especially the case if it makes the question title long or cumbersome. In the case where someone has a strong preference for the title in the question however, we will allow that - but don't be surprised if someone edits it out later.

I hope this answers your question. Welcome to M&TV by the way.