Automate process for naming page titles?

[LindaSchumacher]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the Moz community, but really loving it. I'm hoping some of you more experienced experts may be able to answer what is probably a pretty basic question.

I'm working for a non-profit client and I used the SEOMOZ tool to run a report on their site errors. I learned that the website has 5,432 duplicate page titles. They had their website redesigned last year before I started working with them and it appears that the developers didn't take into a account the need to provide unique page title names to each page.

While it may make sense to go in to add custom page titles to a handful of the pages for the site, the vast majority of the pages are allocated to products (e-commerce). Is there a script that the developers could add that would automatically add page unique page titles based on say, the title of the product?

Here are a few URLs to help you get a sense of what we're dealing with.

homepage: www.creativityexplored.org

example level two page: http://www.creativityexplored.org/artists/douglas-sheran

example product page: http://www.creativityexplored.org/shop/original-art/prints/2776/profile-of-a-lady

Thank you so much for any advice you can offer.

Best,

Linda

[LindaSchumacher]

Hey George. Thanks for cluing me into the Holiday Express reference. Very funny. And yes, you were able to help me out.

Thank you!

[GeorgeAndrews]

No problem, glad I could help.

The Holiday Inn Express reference is in regards to a series of commercials they ran some time ago lol...

Here's a Youtube video from one of them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=l8Ah8WTL2i8

It basically means that I don't normally code in Ruby, but I think I can still help you out ;).

[LindaSchumacher]

Hi George,

Thank you for your response. No, not too technical at all. I follow what you're saying. I'll pass this information on to my client and hopefully it's a relatively easy fix.

If anyone else has any additional information about implementing the solution specifically for Ruby code, I would appreciate it.

Thank you!

Linda

P.S. George, I'm curious, what is the connection between being a Ruby developer and staying at a Holiday Inn Express?

[GeorgeAndrews]

It looks like the product pages are dynamically created based on the product id in the URL (e.g. 2776 from your product page example). This product page could be updated to dynamically produce a different title based on this same information.

For example:

$product = getProductByProductID(2776);

$artist = getArtistByArtistID($product->artistID);

<title><?php echo "$product->name by $artist->name"; ?></title>

?>

Mind you, this is PHP code and you are using RESTful URLs so your site is likely written in Ruby - though I'm just guessing here.

For Ruby, this is essentially pseudo-code as I am not a Ruby developer by day (though I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night), but I believe you are looking to do something like this in your controller:

def product_page

@product = Product.find(params[:id])

@artist = Artist.find(@product.artistid)

@page_title = "<%=@product.name%> by <%=@artist.name%>"

end

Then in your page template you can use:

<title><%= @page_title %></title>

Hope this helps and sorry if it is too technical/cryptic; but your developers should be able to do something like this pretty easily. It appears to already be underway to produce the rest of the page content. Now they just need to use it to populate the page title (and maybe the meta description - use part of the product description).