Help choosing titles
-
Good evening guys, I changed my titles last month, in preparation for the over optimisation penalty and the result was an instant and quite dramatic loss in traffic.
I believe the reason is, the change resulted in a lot of duplicate titles.
My website is similar to deviant art, but for mobile phones. So the titles include the brand of mobile phone for example.
The titles were: Upload name + Brand + Content type - 3 tags - FILEID
So an example would be Black Nokia wallpaper - black, abstract, grey - 12345
I changed them to Black Nokia wallpaper by artist name on domain name.
But this resulted in thousands of duplicate titles and a dramatic loss in traffic. For example a user could upload 20 black wallpapers.
With this in mind, I need to change my titles and fast. But I don't want to make another mistake.
The one I am quite keen to try is:
Black Nokia Wallpaper - Tag1, tag2 wallpapers - on domain name.
So the main variable would be the name of the upload and then the 2 tags, to mix things up a little.
Another option would be to throw the file ID in there somewhere? As that will always be unique. Perhaps the file ID could be in the place of the "wallpapers" after the two tags?
I'd like to keep the domain name, for branding reasons.
Any other suggestions are warmly welcomed.
Thanks a lot.
-
Jeremy, I could not agree more. It was among the worst decisions I've made in the seven years of working with websites.
It was completely knee jerk and plain dumb.
I think the drop was likely partly due to such a site wide change and then due to the duplicate pages that then resulted.
Thanks for the input.
-
The drop in rankings could be just because you changed the titles. For some reason google doesn't like it when you change titles, perhaps because it signals them that you're trying to change them in order to rank?
Anyhow, I've changed titles on one of our home pages twice in the last 3 or so months. I wish I would have just left it alone...each time my rankings dropped, then started to climb. I'm basically where I was to begin with now before I changed anything and I'm leaving it alone now!
Anyhow, I'd make one more change to get rid of most of the duplicates and then leave it alone. That said, I like:
Upload Name - tag, tag - Brand (fileid)
-
Haha well yes, in this case, optimal would be not too optimised.
Testing worries me, as I fear Google will think I'm trying to reverse engineer and smack me with the biggest stick they have.
I am hoping my first change, has the desired result.
-
But not too optimal right?
I don't have any suggestions apart from test your new variations and see. Although it sounds like introducing stricter naming conventions might help as well.
-
Oh, also I really want to still include my brand name in the title. Which wasn't present prior.
-
Hi Ben, the titles don't effect how things are linked internally, that's all dealt with in other ways.
I could of course roll back the titles to exactly how they were before. But as I'm changing them, I just wanted to ensure they were as optimal as possible.
Thanks
-
Do your title tags also determine how you link internally and are they inserted dynamically into content on the page?
If not then (and let me know if I'm being dim-witted here) I don't see anything massively wrong with the first set of titles. Could you roll back and do a quick test to see if it works?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
URL Index Removal for Hacked Website - Will this help?
My main question is: How do we remove URLs (links) from Google's index and the 1000s of created 404 errors associated with them after a website was hacked (and now fixed)? The story: A customer came to us for a new website and some SEO. They had an existing website that had been hacked and their previous vendor was non-responsive to address the issue for months. This created THOUSANDS of URLs on their website that were then linked to pornographic and prescription med SPAM sites. Now, Google has 1,205 pages indexed that create 404 errors on the new site. I am confident these links are causing Google to not rank well organically. Additional information: Entirely new website Wordpress site New host Should we be using the "Remove URLs" tool from Google to submit all 1205 of these pages? Do you think it will make a difference? This is down from the 22,500 URLs that existed when we started a few months back. Thank you in advance for any tips or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tosten0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Duplicate Content and Titles
Hi Mozzers, I saw a considerable amount of duplicate content and page titles on our clients website. We are just implementing a fix in the CMS to make sure that these are all fixed. What changes do you think I could see in terms of rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Can Bundling Products Help eCommerce SEO?
We currently have over 13,000 products on our site. SeoMoz reports many duplicate pages, which are items that are very similar (different size, application, sku, etc.). Would it be prudent to create a bundled product that has one page, one description, a set of images and a table with add to cart buttons for all of the different products on that page? (called a bundled product in Magento). Then create 301 redirects from all of the individual pages and categories to the relevant new bundled product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iJeep0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1 -
Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
Is it dangerous to have your H1 tag and your title the exact same thing? My thought was that it's not be the best use of space, but that it couldn't cause harm. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes7