Title Template Consistency

Finds pages whose title breaks the template the rest of the site follows

Rule ID	content/title-pattern-outlier
Category	Content
Scope	Site-wide
Severity	warning
Weight	3/10

How it works

Most sites title their pages with one template: a page name, a separator, and the brand. No per-page check can see that template, because it only exists across the corpus. This rule infers it from your own crawled titles and reports the pages that break it.

It works out two things from the titles themselves:

• the brand affix: the segment most titles carry at the same end, first or last
• the separator that sits next to that brand (|, ::, », >, -, : )

Then it reports four kinds of deviation:

Deviation	What it means
Missing brand	The title never mentions the brand the rest of the site carries
Inverted order	The brand is at the opposite end from the norm
Different separator	The brand is separated by something other than the modal separator
Brand only	The title is nothing but the brand, so the page has no name of its own

Each page is reported once, for its most meaningful deviation.

It stays quiet unless it has grounds to speak:

• Fewer than 10 crawled pages, or fewer than 10 pages with a title: there is no template to infer, so the rule is skipped.
• No brand affix reaching 70% agreement: the site’s titles genuinely follow no single template, so nothing in it is a deviant.
• On a site with more than one section, a candidate brand only ever seen inside one section is treated as a section label, not the brand.
• The homepage is exempt: “Acme - tools for X” is a normal home title and a normal departure from the template every other page follows.
• Pages with no title at all belong to Meta Title, which stays per-page. The two rules never both flag the same page.

Pages generated from the same template sit inside the norm by construction, so a large templated site is clean here unless a pocket of pages genuinely drifted.

Solution

Most of your pages title themselves the same way - a page name, a separator, and your brand - and these pages do not. Inconsistent titles cost you brand recall in the search results and make templated pages look hand-edited or broken. Fix the template at its source (the layout or CMS field that builds the title) rather than page by page, keeping the brand on the same side with the same separator everywhere. A page that deliberately differs, like the homepage or a campaign landing page, is fine: the point is that a handful of pages should not be the exception.

Enable / Disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["content/title-pattern-outlier"]

Disable all Content rules

[rules]
disable = ["content/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["content/title-pattern-outlier"]
disable = ["*"]