Page Title weirdness

[Mr.Skull]

Since I first started my Smugmug pro account I have had a custom page title, which unfortunately puts the same title on every single page. This is extremely bad for search engines as you may know.:cry Anyway, I was checking out the new easy customizer functions, and was trying out the page title function on it to see if it would get rid of the "powered by smugmug" tag. It didn't, not a biggie. But I did notice something which I had not noticed before when I turned the custom title on and off:

If the custom title is off, the home page will read the default "Smugmug Photo Sharing. Your photos look better here." What pro wants that? :wink HOWEVER, I did notice that the gallery pages will at least have individual titles, like this: "your name : photos: YOUR GALLERY TITLE- powered by smugmug". :huh To me, even having the gallery titles show up like this is better than having the same title on every single page. I mean, at least the search engines will be able to distinguish between your pages.

C'mon Smugmug, can't we get individual page titles? Or at least the option where we can add the custom title to the home page only, and let the gallery pages be default and have the title of the gallery title? :D

Cheers,
Joel

[steamphotos]

I agree that we're left with a pretty bad compromise at present. If your gallery titles are important to your SEO as they are for most of us (e.g. town names, team names, event names, etc.), it could be best to just let SM use the gallery titles and add a javascript hack to customize the title on the homepage only (for appearance purposes only, as search engines will just index the SmugMug default).

The solution to all of this would be so simple -- just add a "page title" field in the gallery customization options. If a user fills it in, use that in the gallery's title tag. If the field is left null, default to the gallery title or sitewide title as is done currently, avoiding any migration issues. After years of posts about this, I've seen some comments from SM in recent months that SEO issues such as this critical one will be addressed in the upcoming SmugMug Pro.