Earlier today, Apple Podcasts sent out an email with some tips on how to “Optimize Your Show’s Metadata”. One of the tips included a note about placing episode numbers in titles. They say:
[Do not add] episode numbers in titles. For example, show titles like “The Very Hungry Tourists Episode 01” or episode titles like “01 Broken Heirloom.”
Then they say something that might sound a bit scary:
These practices could result in your show being rejected or removed from Apple Podcasts.
Well that sounds bad, doesn’t it?
So, I gave my contact at Apple Podcasts a call and asked him about this. He explained that they aren’t planning to kick podcasts off for doing this, but that they really want podcasters to use two brand new iTunes tags in their feeds. These tags, itunes:episode and itunes:title, split the episode’s number from its title, and allow for better parsing and display of podcasts in the iTunes Store and in Apple Podcasts.
Although best practices suggest against manually inserting the word “Episode” and episode numbers into titles, we have never prohibited this, just as we’ve made it easy to use text instead of numbers for episode slugs (some people prefer to customize their URLs, despite the fact that this no longer affects SEO or discoverability).
If you’ve been manually adding the word “episode” and the episode’s number to your titles, you should instead enter the episode number as the slug, and enter a words-only title in the title field. If you do this, Fireside will handle creating a good title for you (using the format you’ve selected in Settings → Appearance → General Options → Title Format), and will also add the two tags to your RSS feed.
This way, when Apple Podcasts detects the new tags, it will ignore the standard title tag and use the new itunes tags instead. So any episode that has a slug that’s a number will automatically receive the new tags, and be correctly displayed by Apple Podcasts. And ... you’re done.
TL;DR: You can enter anything you want as a title, and enter numbers or text as your slug, but best practices say you should just enter a number as the slug, and the actual title in the title field. If you do this, Fireside will be smart and create special itunes tags that make Apple Podcasts happy, while still showing nice titles in the format you’ve specified on your podcast’s website.
I hope this clears things up!
Happy podcasting,
Dan Benjamin
