Research removal of "FEC | "and " - FEC.gov" from global search results titles

[JonellaCulmer]

What we're after: Following the site map work, we are now displaying - FEC.gov at the end of many wagtail pages. We would like to remove this as it adds no value while on the FEC website and potentially creates confusion regarding the storage of our content.

Slack discussion: https://fecgov.slack.com/archives/C3X3K6EVA/p1695909045823319

Completion criteria

• [ ] Research has been documented
• [ ] Next steps for removal have been proposed
• [ ] Followup tickets created for next steps.

Research considerations

• [ ] Document where the FEC | prefix and - FEC.gov suffix are coming from
• [ ] Document who's reading what (e.g. Google, Bing, social media, search.gov, fec.gov search results)
• [ ] Determine a path to fix based on the aforementioned topics

[rfultz]

FTR, we're adding the - FEC.gov suffix in two-ish places (two lines of two templates) and | FEC* in 10 places

[rfultz]

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link

How title links in Google Search are created Google's generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the title link is to best represent and describe each result.

Google Search uses the following sources to automatically determine title links:

• Content in <title> elements
• Main visual title shown on the page
• Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
• Other content that's large and prominent through the use of style treatments
• Other text contained in the page
• Anchor text on the page
• Text within links that point to the page
• WebSite structured data

[johnnyporkchops]

Where the prefix/suffix come from:

The "FEC | ..." prefix comes from the title_tag field in Wagtail editing template's promote tab ( it's called seo_title in the database).

• According to the conditional statement in the base.html template , from which all cms pages inherit, the title will use the title_tag(seo_title) value if present, for a prefix, othewise a suffix of " | FEC" is added. (data and legal base templates do not have this conditonal statemtent)
  • The title_tag(seo_title) value from the Wagtail template is used in the page's browser tab
  • It also shows up in the title on search-result listings
  • However, the following pages that use get_content_secrtion(self) in models.py do not show value from the title_tag(seo_title) in search-result listings. Instead, they get a suffix of "- FEC.gov" from meta tags in partials/mets-tags.html
    • ResourcePage, CustomPage, RecordPage, CollectionPage, DocumentFeedPage

      How to remove the prefix/suffix from search.gov, site-search results:

      The below draft pull request has a filter added to the search.html template to remove both pattens (FEC | and - FEC.gov) from the titles of site-search results.

  • PR: https://github.com/fecgov/fec-cms/pull/6033
  • Branch: feature/5945-rm-prefix-suffix-from-insite-search-results
  • Note: Because of match-highlighting, searches performed with "FEC" or "FEC.gov" included in the search-term will not be shown with these patterns removed.