URL: /rules/content/title-pattern-outlier

---
title: "Title Template Consistency"
description: "Finds pages whose title breaks the template the rest of the site follows"
---

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

| | |
|---|---|
| **Rule ID** | `content/title-pattern-outlier` |
| **Category** | [Content](/rules/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](/rules/core/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

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["content/title-pattern-outlier"]
```

### Disable all Content rules

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["content/*"]
```

### Enable only this rule

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
enable = ["content/title-pattern-outlier"]
disable = ["*"]
```