Ticket #7162 (closed defect: duplicate)
Trac default title suffix causes massive Google pollution
| Reported by: | Sam Hocevar | Owned by: | cmlenz |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | |
| Component: | admin/console | Version: | 0.10.4 |
| Severity: | major | Keywords: | |
| Cc: |
Description
By default Trac appends "- Trac" to each title page (top of header.cs). While this improves Trac's overall visibility, it also causes massive search engine pollution. With a trac, trac here and a trac, trac there, here a trac, there a trac, everywhere a trac, trac.
Looking for proper information about Trac is now impossible. Any request is highly polluted by unrelated Trac installations.
For instance, I was looking for a possible script to paste the Timeline information on an IRC channel. Quite naturally, my first try was "trac IRC bot" on Google. Alas! What I get are hits for Trac installations of the rbot, EnvBot or IRC Bot Workbench projects, which have absolutely nothing to do with Trac.
Another example was just before submitting this bug report. I was wondering whether anyone else was annoyed by the pollution, so quite naturally I looked for "trac page title" on Google to see whether the problem with page titles was mentioned somewhere. And as you can see, there are hundreds of results, none of which have anything to do with Trac.
And yes, I know how to play with inurl:, intitle: and site: keywords when doing Google searches. They just don't work well enough against that kind of search engine pollution.
