Quick edit and bulk edit

Hi Ralf!

Quick edit is available — when you hover over a post or page in the list table and click “Quick Edit”, you will see fields for Meta Title, Meta Description, Canonical URL, Redirect URL, robots settings, and Article Type (via Articles extension). These work per individual post, including with WPML translations (each translation is its own post).

Bulk edit for titles and descriptions, however, is intentionally not supported. We only offer bulk editing for robots’ settings (indexing, link following, archiving) and Article Type. The reason is that Google explicitly recommends unique descriptions for every page:

Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful when individual pages appear in search results. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. — Google Search Central

The same principle applies to titles. Google will actively override duplicate titles with its own generated versions:

Here are the most common issues we see with title links in search results […]: Micro-boilerplate text in <title> elements — When there are repeated boilerplate text in <title> elements for a subset of pages within a site. — Google Search Central

A bulk edit field for titles and descriptions would primarily enable setting the same (or very similar) text across many pages at once, which runs counter to what search engines expect. My design philosophy with quick edit — one post at a time — naturally encourages unique content for each page.

For your three-language WPML setup, quick edit should work well: each language version is a separate post in the list, so you can inline-edit them individually right from the post list.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by Sybre Waaijer. Reason: typo