Blogger: change browser title bar contents

Sunday, August 06, 2006

If you blog using Blogger you'll have noticed that, when people visit your blog and view an individual post (as opposed to just the main blog page), the title bar at the top of their browser window will show the name of your blog followed by (if they're looking at a post or item page) the title of the particular blog post.

In the case of my blog, for instance, when you go to this post your browser title bar will read "A Consuming Experience: LG Chocolate KG800 PC connection, ringtones, wallpaper, file transfer: mobile phone review 2 - Mozilla Firefox " (or "A Consuming Experience: LG Chocolate KG800 PC connection, ringtones, wallpaper, file transfer: - Internet Explorer" if you use IE, which does cut things off a bit short.)

What if you want it to show the title of the post first, then the name of the blog?

Well then try this template hack which Scott Kingery has described for changing the order of display in the title bar in exactly that way. It doesn't trouble me so I've not implemented the hack, but if you look at Scott's blog you'll see the different order - post title then blog title - in that order.

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8 Comment(s):

Hey, thanks for the link :)
I came up with that hack because I've heard that it helps SEO to have it that way. I think it has but I have no numbers to confirm that.

(By Scott, at 07 August, 2006 15:21) Edit Comment

Thanks Scott. (Sorry I'm very behind in catching up with comments!)

Would be interesting to have figures to confirm that. I wonder if anyone else has run tests?

(By Improbulus, at 23 August, 2006 22:35) Edit Comment

Hey, thanks for pointing me in the right direction on this Blogger page title hack. Works like a charm! Regardless of whether it helps much on the SEO side of things, it certainly made life a little easier with my sitemap generation and it just looks better.

Two thumbs up!

(By Rob, at 29 January, 2007 11:38) Edit Comment

Ta for the feedback Rob, glad it helped!

(By Improbulus, at 31 January, 2007 09:01) Edit Comment

hi... anyone know how to get the label tag into the title? this is *very* important for SEO and i haven't found anyone talking about it.

(By Josh, at 14 March, 2007 17:30) Edit Comment

i am using the old blogger format ... i dont want to change to the new one because i've spent so much time setting up my templates perfectly and the new system doesnt seem to have enough flexibility to it.

(By Josh, at 14 March, 2007 17:31) Edit Comment

Josh, I don't think people talk about getting labels/tags into the title because perhaps that's not the purpose of labels/tags. Certainly in the case of my blog I use quite a few tags per post to try to be fully descriptive, and putting them all into the title would be too much. If you are desperate to get certain descriptive concepts into the title, why not just add them there manually when you enter the post title?

I've recently switched to New Blogger myself, and Blogger did preserve my old template though I had to tweak a few things to get them to work. I think we'll all be forced to change soon, whether we like it or not, anyway. The new template takes some getting used to but does have the potential for flexibility too.

(By Improbulus, at 20 March, 2007 22:10) Edit Comment

Thanks for the link - I'm going to shoot over to Scott's page now to see if I can get it going.

(By Electric Feel, at 23 September, 2008 11:01) Edit Comment