Provide descriptive page titles Usability Guideline

Description

This page has a default title like ‘Untitled’ or ‘Title’. Each page should have a descriptive and meaningfully different title.

Help

Title refers to the text shown in each browser tab, and displayed in search engines results pages. If two or more pages have the same title, they cannot be differentiated by users or the Bookmarks capability of the browser.

Applicable standards

Note: The guidelines.usability.gov website has been down since July 2020, although www.usability.gov is still operating and the PDF version of the guidelines is still available.

Change history

  • 5.33 Apr 2019 Fixed false positive.
  • 5.27 Oct 2017 Improved placeholder detection.
  • 5.22 Jul 2016 Fixed false positive.
  • 5.21 Mar 2016 Fixed false positive.
  • 5.2 May 2013 Updated priority to match April 2013 version of guidelines.
  • 3.0 Dec 2008 Updated list of default titles.
  • 2.0 Dec 2007 Added.

This page describes a web site issue detected in PDF and HTML documents by SortSite Desktop and OnDemand Suite.

Rule ID: UseGov9.2.3