Should questions have WordPress in the question title?

Question

I have found that I'm editing a lot of questions recently and when doing so if I find the word WordPress in the question title I more times than not remove it. At the same time I reword the title to be more descriptive of the users problem/question.

This is a WordPress Q&A site after all so saying that your question is about WordPress is pointless as its a given that your question will be about WordPress.

Take this title for example: Where can I download WordPress themes? I would reword it to Where can I download themes for X type of site?. The only place I wouldn't take out the word WordPress from the title is if its along the lines of: Integrating WordPress with X.

So my question is am I OK to remove WordPress from the title if I'm rewording it? Does removing it have any negative effects on the sites SEO or search function if I remove WordPress from the titles? Is it something other editors should consider too?

Answer 1

Here's the meta tag from the head:

<meta name="title" content="post thumbnails - Displaying a featured image (only img url) as the img src? - WordPress - Stack Exchange">

Where the suffix …

• WordPress - Stack Exchange

… always stays in place.

So: No, it shouldn't affect SE results.

Plus: I too always try to make titles to sum up the topic + sub case. I think it's better as I'm myself finding it harder and harder to go through tag archives or search results and the titles don't describe what's the Q in general about and if I should take a look at it to maybe find a solution (or hint to one) for my specific problem.

Answer 2

My personal rule of a thumb - don't mess with titles if there is no pressing cause. I will rewrite the title if it's completely bonkers or question had changed, but I won't touch anything that is clear enough for the sake of minor changes.

Answer 3

I was actually wondering the same thing when I saw a question like that today. I personally think it should be edited out, we ALL know this is a WordPress site (hence the huge word in the header) and we can safely assume that the question is about WordPress.

However if it is a question that is not WP-specific, might as well leave WordPress in the title in case it is migrated to SO or another network (if needed) but I fear when the SO people see 'WordPress' anywhere they want to migrate it here.

Not sure on the impact it has on SEO but I would assume that the search engines will also know that this is a WordPress-specific site. Also I can't imagine somebody searching for "WordPress" here. :)

Just my two cents.

Edit: On another note, I second Rarst's answer. For the sake of not editing a single word in the title for that purpose it shouldn't be too important.