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Hi all,

A while ago, I decided to hide the article titles in the Article Manager Options and show them in the article using <H1> tags.

My question is: am I missing out on search profile by doing this? Or are the tags still there for indexing but just not presented to the viewer?

I'm starting to optimise my site and wondered if this explained quite a drop in traffic over the last few weeks. I'm using 1.6.

Many thanks.

Steve

Not sure what you mean by dropping the title, do you mean from the actual web page title tag? if so yes that would be bad, because Page Title is one of the most important on page SEO factors. So if all your <TITLE/> has is "john's blog" search engines will take that as the first cue as to what your page is about.

H1 is also important, second to TITLE tage, but form my experience if you keywords are not in Page title then you will not rank.

The <title> is still filled in correctly, I think the option to hide it just means that it is not presented to the viewer at the top of the page. I then use <h1> tag to show the title of the page where I want it (I have added some extra navigation at the top of each page and want the title below this, not above it).

The <title> tag still appears in the page source of the viewed page. I was just wondering if , by choosing to hide it in this way, I was inadvertently losing its effect.

Thanks,

S

Anything hidden on the page is black hat SEO and hence bad.

I can not understand why this is even good for anything. Sounds like a very bad thing to do from SEO perspective. This is one thing that you should not do. Look for other alternatives.

You can not play with title tags or with the browser like that. Title is or title not.

Anyways why you want to do this?

Thanks all; slightly surprised by the suggestion this is not a legitimate setting, as it's the top item in Joomla's article manager options? Whilst it might not be good for SEO, I can't see that it is 'black hat SEO' as sagarmandape has described - I'm not fooling the search engine in any way, just selecting for the title tag to not be shown. I'd be interested in others views as I certainly don't want to take any risks if this a real no-no.

The only reason I use the option, as explained above, is that there some circumstances where I do not want the title to be, by deafult, at the top of the article: on some pages I add extra submenus or an image header here within the content and I want the title below these and therefore I insert the same title wording with a H1 tag exactly where I do want it.

Is anyone sure that by hiding the text of the <title> tag using this Joomla option - it is still within the page source code, just not shown to the viewer - that this is poor for SEO? If so, can anybody suggest a way in which I can choose the location of the <title> tag on the page for a Joomla article or another alternative (I guess rearranging my page layout would be one, but loathe to do that at this point if a viable alternative exists)?

Many thanks,

Steve

Just because you choose "Show Page Title" to No does not mean your Page Title is not shown at all. It still appears in the top of the browser chrome in the upper left.

I use this option quite often when I do not want my Page title or "article title" to appear in my content area.

Mark

The confusion has been caused by the word Hidden. If the title was still used in the HTML code, but hidden by CSS this could be bad.

But you are using Joomla's option to not display the title, which is fine so long as you are adding it in manually as you have explained.

@ LondonJoe & Markstein, thanks for the information, that's good to know - much appreciated.

Steve

Blackhat/Grayhat Seo is not cool for Seo (:

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