Pattern 62: Unique names for pages, titles and meta-tags
AKA:

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You have included a SEARCH BOX (14) on your site. Pages need titles and meta-tags to identify them, but on dynamic sites, if they are not updated with content, they become irrelevant. You want to be able to TRACK MULTIPLE IDENTICAL REQUESTS (61) and enhance the user’s SENSE OF LOCATION (15).

Search engines shouldn’t return multiple links to same site, or they should grey out all references to a site that has been visited – even if the URLs are different). However, the browser cannot be expected to deduce that sites with different names are same and grey them out should this be the case.

Therefore

Use unique titles and meta-tags for static and dynamic pages. Always use the same URL to designate any given page.

This pattern is terminal within this language.

Contributors and sources
Andy Harbach, Jari Worsley, Nielsen (2000)

Discussion - forces - known uses

Non-unique titles and meta-tags make identifying pages difficult or impossible for searching, search engines or bookmarks. It is also important to ensure that page titles are meaningful.

If a page is referred to by two names then a browser cannot know that both links refer to the same page. The user may well becomes either confused or angry when she clicks on a blue link only to find that she has been to this place before – the other link was purple of course.

Using commonly used search keywords for page titles will ensure that search engines rate your site highly against these keywords.

Example
The search results pages of AltaVista or DejaNews.

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