Daring Fireball: Title Junk
Gruber’s sentiment is right on:
Most bookmarking tools — the ones built into web browsers, and bookmarklets for third-party apps — do use the page title as the default bookmark name. Tools that help people tweet links to articles use the page title as the default description. So make titles useful. Write them for humans, not search engine spiders.
His technical arguments about whether SEO keyword junk “works” are suspect, but that’s beside the point. What we have here is a tragedy of the commons: some sites realize that by optimizing their HTML document titles for machines, they gain a short-term tactical advantage over their competitors. Never mind that those titles are now substantially less useful for the people who try to use them.
Trust the Googlebot to figure it out.
Don’t trust. Expect. If indeed stuffing the document title full of keyword junk does improve search engine ranking, that is a bug with the search engines. Keyword junk is an exploit, not a strategy. Search engines should do a better job inferring relevance from human optimized content and stop encouraging sites who waste our time and attention.
Yes, it’s a hard problem. That’s why it’s interesting.
