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I’m having a dilemma lately: several questions were edited for the sole purpose of removing the name of the product or service from their title. The justification for this actions was that the respective name was already mentioned in the tags of the questions—a valid justification, I agree. But here is my problem: regular users use Google (or Bing) to search for different solutions to their problems, so in my opinion, removing the respective names from the titles does more harm than good from this point of view.

What say you, should the name of the service/product be in the title or not? (Not as a rule, but if it’s mentioned, should be left as it is.)

(I should mention that I haven’t done any search testing to support my theory, it’s just an “educated guess”, so if you can prove me wrong, I’m more than OK with it.)

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    so in my opinion, removing the respective names from the titles does more harm than good - agreed
    – Sathyajith Bhat Mod
    Commented Nov 13, 2013 at 10:24
  • I've been rejecting those edits as I find them. I've left at least one custom reason explaining why, but I don't think it was seen.
    – ale
    Commented Nov 13, 2013 at 13:27
  • I rejected one of those leaving an explanation as well, but edit was accepted nonetheless. And I just skipped most of the others.
    – Alex
    Commented Nov 13, 2013 at 13:55
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    MSO topic: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19190/… - the system adds the most common tag to the title for search engines anyway
    – John C
    Commented Nov 18, 2013 at 16:21

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Titles should make sense and be able to stand alone.

If the name of the service (and hence the tag) needs to be in the title for it to make sense then it should be there.

The "no tags in titles" rule guideline comes from sites like SO where people write titles like:

[C#] How do I add three items together?

Which is a bad title anyway, but doesn't need the tag in the title as the title makes sense without it.

A title like:

How do I search for special characters in Google?

is OK, as the alternative:

How do I search for special characters?

makes less sense. Which search engine are you talking about? Are you talking about a search engine at all? You can't find the answers to these questions without actually opening the question and reading it and the tags. Having the product name, and hence tag, in the title is perfectly valid and indeed preferable.

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