The title and meta formula governance SOP

The title and meta formula governance SOP

At scale, titles are generated from a formula. A bad formula produces 50k bad titles. Govern the formula like code.

The rules for any generated title pattern:

1. Length budget — Owner: SEO. Compute worst-case length using your longest entity value, not the average. Gate: 95th-percentile title stays under 60 characters.

2. Front-load the variable — the unique entity goes first, boilerplate brand suffix last. Gate: no two pages share their first 30 characters.

3. No empty-variable fragments — if a slot is null, the whole fragment drops, including its connector word. Gate: no "Best Hotels in | Brand".

4. Number sanity — never render "0" or "1 result" as if it sells. Gate: counts below a floor are omitted, not shown.

5. One formula per template — a template gets exactly one title pattern. Variants get a new template.

— Meta descriptions follow the same five rules, with a 155-character budget
— Worst-case length, never average, is what gets you truncated in the SERP

Ship gate: don't publish the formula until the 95th-percentile render passes the length budget.