The page title is one of the most important pieces of information that search engines display on their results page, for any given search query. Choosing the right title for your pages, articles (or posts of any type) is probably a key factor that may lead users to choose your site ...or just jump to somewhere else.

By default, Drupal displays the site name and the page title, which is nice. However, any given page title you need to write is probably based on the context where it is published. So that alone might be misleading if it is not seen within the correct context. That is, in some circumstancies (say a book page, taxonomy based reports, etc.) only the title might not be enough.

On the other hand, Drupal has another pretty nifty feature, the ability to build breadcrumbs based on context. That's almost perfect, for what I was trying to accomplish. All we need to do is build the page title based on the current active breadcrumb and append the page title.

I thought I could share the code snippet I'm using on this site, so you may try it and see if such a small change can be translated into more visits coming from search engine queries.

By chance, I found a query that, I think, it can give us a rough answer:

http://www.google.com/search?q=*+*

Click on it and look at the line (on top of the page) that reads "Results 1 - 10 of about ...". It was 25,270,000,000 when I checked.

Now, do you know of any similar trick for other major search engines? I've tried with Yahoo! and MSN Search with no luck. Oh, well... :-)

Let's guess how many time it would take to crawl all those pages?

I've been waiting for about a month, yet I finally got my Google Analytics invitation! If you navigate with MSIE, depending on your browser settings, you may now see an alert similar to this:

If you don't, you probably should (You may want to) read about the latest publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer or any of the recent posts at the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog.
Note: It's been fixed here ;-)

BTW, if you ever need to install the Google Analytics snippet to track your phpBB based board, you may wish to not generate the javascript code when you're logged in as administrator. To do so, you may try the following...

This is a follow up on the "Moving content and search engines" post [1], related to the Google's page rank issue with the "How to create a dynamic signature" guide [2]. When I wrote that post [1], links to the guide [2] started to appear at page 6, so I was wondering how effective the mod_rewrite trick to generate an HTTP 301 error (redirect permanent) was going to be...

Let's see how many time it takes to get rid of the old references.

Well, just checked again and I was kindly surprised. When searching at Google for dynamic+signatures, the guide [2] was found on the first page! In fact, it was the first link! :-)

So... what's interesting with this experience?

I was kind of innocent when I wrote the dynamic signatures guide, as a response of a forum question. I could never imagine the success of this guide. I'm sure it is one of the most important factors contributing to this site's page rank. Nothing spectacular, but given that the community activity here is not very high, I believe I can feel quite happy with it.

If you tried to search for "dynamic signatures" (I guess this is a competitive enough combination of words) at Google, Yahoo! or MSN, you ended up finding that little guide, close to the top of the list. At this time, it seems Yahoo! and MSN have noticed the change, however, this is not the case with Google.

I'm very happy to think it has been of some help for one or two out there. However, I moved the guide here from my old website. The URL (and even the domain) is now different. How could I tell Google about this change?

Actually, I have a little problem with this guide that I'm planning to solve using a mod_rewrite trick ...

Update: Yep, it looks like it worked!