Startup Title Junk

People pay me money for this, and I didn't know that trick. Thanks.<p>As long as we're all here obsessing on title tags:<p>Apples, Oranges, Potatoes | Farmly<p>is my go-to template for a title tag. You'll find in very competitive verticals the title is more optimized and less English, e.g. by not having the natural "and" before Potatoes.<p>Companies not dependent on rankings for customers acquisition can use the title tag to compete for CTR on the SERP. This is most relevant to companies with very recognizable brands. e.g. see whatever Amazon's title is now. Almost everybody will maximize for search engines on leaf node pages.

Everybody who is diving off to take advantage of this trick, <i>stop</i>, its not true.<p>The opensearch protocol describes the onsite search interface, so browsers (that support it) can add that search engine as an option. So, in effect, the opensearch link on the AirBnB sist is just saying "hey, if you want you can access the AirBnB search engine straight from your browser".<p>It has absolutely nothing to do with how google (etc.) index and display your site in their search results.<p>Instead, the AirBnB homepage comes up as 'AirBnB' (mostly) because it has a huge number of trusted incoming links containing hypertext 'AirBnB'. Google treats these as kind of 'alternative title text suggestions', and if you get enough they can override the actual page text in some cases.<p>So the trick is (as always) to link build.

I don't think this has anything to do with the Opensearch.xml file, from what I've seen Google is also doing this manually.<p>Previously they have been using the title from DMOZ but, Check out our startup in the SERPS "StoreCrowd" the branded search returns the brand name in the results. However our title reads more like "Coupon Codes, Deals &#38; Discounts for Online Stores"<p>We launched an Australian version with an optimised title tag but it appears in branded search as "StoreCrowd Australia".<p>Neither sites are in DMOZ nor do we use the Opensearch protocol.

Awesome. I never knew you could do stuff like this. We need more articles like this one on HN.

i had somewhat the opposite problem: my site was showing up on yahoo's search with a weird title, something i've never had as my title and certainly not anywhere in my html.<p>i emailed them and they replied saying, "<i>The title and description listed in the Yahoo! Search results can come from many different places, only one of which is the actual metadata in the page itself. The title and description can also come from descriptions on other websites which link to yours or directory services such as the Yahoo! Directory or other third party directory services.</i>"<p>i had to add "noodp, noydir" to the meta robots tag on my site to prevent this from happening.

Fantastic. Applying it to my site right now.<p>I'm a little humbled to realize I've stopped viewing source as much as I did five years ago.<p>I really should do it more often so I can see cool things like this, especially for sites with great SEO.<p>Love the random Wag's Revue shout-out. I happened to meet one of the editors at E3 and discovered it that way, but via Google would've been a lot easier. It deserves more notice.

This seems backwards to me. Shouldn't the "extended" description be the one hidden from the user's title bar, not the short one?

This is very interesting. There are a lot of brand-sensitive client types such as healthcare organizatons and higher education who would love this. I do have one question though.<p>According to Wikipedia's list of software and search engines that support OpenSearch, only Google Chrome is on the list. [1]<p>Google as a search engine is not listed. The screenshot in the article is also in Chrome.<p>I wonder if this feature is supported in Firefox or IE.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch</a><p>edit: tested in Firefox, it works. this is great!

Very interesting, I didn't know about Opensearch. I'll spend my afternoon setting it up on my websites...<p>Now if browsers and bookmarking service start using the Short name for the title bar, we will have reinvented the meta keywords tag :-)

Bing does not change its title for airbnb <a href="http://www.bing.com/search?q=airbnb" rel="nofollow">http://www.bing.com/search?q=airbnb</a><p>Cool trick!

How do we increase the chance to get sitelinks to show up on google?

Great. Thanks for the tips