Page Title Auditor

The HTML <title> is the primary snippet search engines show in results and the label browsers use for tabs and bookmarks. This auditor fetches the page, extracts the title with jsoup, and checks its presence, length, structure, and quality: duplicate title tags, CMS placeholder copy, all-caps titles, titles unrelated to the H1, and titles missing the site name.

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How it works

The auditor loads the audited URL and evaluates the first <title> element:

1. Fetch — requests the HTML with jsoup (including HTTP Basic Auth when provided).
2. Extract — reads document.selectFirst("title") and trims surrounding whitespace; also counts <title> elements, reads the first <h1>, and derives the site name from the hostname (first label after stripping www.).
3. Rules — applies missing, empty, excessively long (over 100), and duplicate-tag checks (FAIL), then too-short (1–14), too-long (71–100), placeholder, all-caps, H1-mismatch, and missing-brand checks (WARNING). Quality rules are skipped when the title is missing or empty.
4. Aggregate — any FAIL rule wins over WARNING; if every rule passes, the audit is SUCCESS.

Fetch errors (unreachable host, invalid URL) produce an ERROR response rather than a title finding.

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What it audits

Every row maps to one checkRule* method and one CheckCode. CheckCode suffixes use status ranges: 200 success, 300–399 warning, 400–499 fail.

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Output documentation

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Risks and considerations

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Search visibility

• Missing or empty titles force search engines to invent a snippet, which often mismatches the page and lowers click-through.
• Titles over 70 characters are typically truncated in SERPs; over 100 characters are almost never shown in full.

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Uniqueness and intent

• A two-word title like "Hi" does not describe the page. Expand it with the primary topic so results and tabs are distinguishable.
• Placeholder titles such as Untitled or Welcome to Liferay signal an unfinished page and are reused across sites, so they never differentiate the result.
• Reusing the same generic title across many URLs collapses rankings and analytics into one unhelpful label.

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Consistency and trust

• When the title and the H1 say different things, users who click the search result land on a page that does not match the snippet, increasing bounces.
• Including the site name in the title (usually as a suffix) builds recognition in results; the auditor infers the name from the hostname and treats spaces or hyphens as equivalent (37audits matches 37 Audits). A title that uses a different spelling still warns.
• All-caps titles read as shouting, are harder to scan, and some engines rewrite them anyway.

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Whitespace and encoding

• Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed before length is measured; a title of only spaces is treated as empty.
• Character count is the Java string length of the trimmed text, not a pixel-width estimate used by some SERP renderers.
• Only the first <title> element is measured; extra title tags are flagged separately and otherwise ignored, matching browser behavior.