Permalinks & SEO Titles - confused!

[Muttley]

I'm a little confused about Permalinks and SEO Title (title tags) within the Product editor section and where that information shows within Google etc. I thought Permalinks showed up in the Browser Tabs, and SEO Titles were where you'd see the blue link just above your product description within the Browser?

I did a few changes to some products recently and the Permalink info is showing in the Browser Tab at the top of the page - not where I'd expect to see it. Have I got it wrong?

[ACn1]

@Muttley I tried these too before realising I had got it wrong. Permalinks are more for blogs where you want the link to stay (permanently)and be an attachment for ohers. Not part of SEO. Use title tags for that.

[Muttley]

@ACn actually, I have it wrong it's the SEO Title that's showing up in the Browser Tabs - shouldn't the SEO Title show as a blue link in the search results just above the product description?

Thanks for the clarification re permalinks - I'll take that on board for future referance

[Muttley]

Maybe I need to wait for google to crawl my site again for me to see the alterations I've done in the product descriptions/seo section. 

[ACn1]

@Muttley It is the title (meta tag) tag which you want to  be shown, and that is the expectation. However it does not always work out, just as the content ("description tag") below is not always shown. Google may take content from the page to insert there if it thinks it is more relevance.

I never found out why other than Google and its AI is not perfect. In fact, far from it, even now. Work on the titles and relevant content and one or other will come up. It doesn't matter which just as long as you gain the page ranking.

[MTpockets2]

HI @ACn and @Muttley,

Great questions! So a permalink is basically used for if you want the change the URL of that page, by default the page will be whatever you named it, any spaces will be replaced with -.

For instance say you have a page called about us, and your website is www.website.com, by default your about us page would be located at www.website.com/about-us.html (notice the - for the space). Let's say you didn't want your URL to be about-us.html, you could update your permalink (let's say we want it to be learn-about-us) to learn about us and the page would then be www.website.com/learn-about-us.html, however on your navigation, it would still say "about us". 

Now with the SEO title, there are two locations for these. There is an overall SEO title location which you can find under "Settings" > "SEO" > Title. This is the default one which is good to fill out. Any new pages that do not have any SEO title filled in, will default to the data used here. 

Next is the page level SEO title. (This one overrides the SEO title placed under Settings > SEO > title)

You can access the SEO page title, from the "pages" tab > click on the page name on the left > SEO settings > Page Title. When a page is created, it will go by the default SEO settings, and then once you fill in the page settings, these override the current settings for that page only. 

Any changes to your SEO or Permalink will need to be republished, and for these changes to show up on search engines like Google, they will need to recrawl your site. 

[ACn1]

@MTpockets A final say on this topic from my side.

Overall, that's right but with some reservations on the impact of different "url's" for the same pages and the ranking impact. (And I make the point only as I won't be adding to it.)

Addiional advice is to add your sitmemap (courtesy of Weebly) to your Google search console. This means updates in page changes/additions will be automatic. Again beware of damaging indexed pages which may be ranked, unless you are ready to undertake a process of 301 re-directs.

As for permalinks, their strength is in blogs, where you usually do not have "sub-page navigation". As the blog gains strength from others linking to it, (the now aged idea of authority resources), then permalinks help there.

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