Q4VR: “Clean Title Rule” For Property Names

We have VR customers with hacky Property titles, like:

Hale Mokulani***TA-055745536001 Available for 2-30 night rental, please call

 

Problem:

1. Special characters are forcing us to come up with hack/workarounds (custom work) to get the special characters past HTML sanitizers (removes special characters) so the property titles show up in titles, in search results, in calendars, etc.
2. The titles are bad for security because.. they are forcing us to come up hack/workarounds to get special characters past HTML sanitizers. You cannot ever trust the source of the data, it should always be sanitized or risk being hacked. So by default, WP and our VR software enforces/sanitizes HTML to avoid Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks. *, /, ~, and many other special characters (single spaced or combined) are normally removed to avoid scripting attacks.
3. It’s not anywhere close to the best SEO title / h1 for a property name. In fact, we know it usually hurts their results.

As we see here, the PM is hacking the title to: show star ratings, add property ID’s, or even add text to tell the customer to call rather than book directly with HA.

This is causing issues on multiple levels for the user (readability), SEO, security, etc. Plus, it looks spammy. As such, readers are psychologically trained (from email subject lines, for example) to ignore results that look like spam.

 

Solution:

Rename property titles to something human readable, like: Hale Mokulani
..or anything more User/SEO friendly. And advise customers to move all the “meta data” to the appropriate location – within the property description, or let reviews promote star ratings, etc.

CEM’s, please work with customers to:

1. Enforce a “Clean Title” rule: only letters, numbers, dash’s, commas, and apostrophes allowed in titles – no other special characters
2. spot this issue ahead of launch
3. retroactively update any broken/bad titles for existing customers – some characters may have gotten around the sanitizers, but it is not good for the user or SEO

Please optimize property titles for best results.