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
-
PLEASE HELP - Old query string URL causing problems
For a long time, we were ranking 1st/2nd for the term "Manual handling training". That was until about 5 days ago when I realised that Google had started to index not only a query stringed URL, but also an old version of the URL. What was even weirder was that when you clicked on the result it 301 redirected to the page that it was meant to display... The wrong URL that Google had started to index was: www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling?channel=retail The correct URL that it should have been indexing is: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling-training I can't get my head around why it has done this as a 301 was in place already and we use rel canonical tags which point to the main parent pages. Anyway, we slapped a noindex tag in our robots.txt file to stop that page from being indexed, which worked but now I can't get the correct page to be indexed, even after a Google fetch. After inspecting the correct URL in the new search console I discovered that Google has ignored the rel canonical on the page (Which points to itself) and has selected the wrong, query stringed URL as the canonical. Why? and how do I rectify this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iHasco1 -
Site under attack from Android SEO bots - expert help needed
For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site. We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case. It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off. Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site. (FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ_AV0 -
Full title in url
Hi to all, what is the best url structure, to have all words in the url or to tweak url like Yoast suggest? If we remove some words from url , not focus keyword but stop words and other keywords to have shorter url will that impact search rankings? example.com/one-because-two-for-three-on-four - long url, moz crawl error, yoast red light example.com/one-two-three-four - moz ok, yoast ok Where one is a focus keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki0 -
Do I need to put the company name in the SEO Title box in Yoast?
I am optimizing Title Tags for a WP site. I am getting ready to add keywords to the Yoast SEO. I noticed the long company name is currently the Title Tag - I choose 2-3 keyword phases per page- what do I do with the long business name? In my own site I can post up 70 characters of keywords in the Title box and my company name appears after a pipe in the browser with my the keywords ahead of it? As Follow on my Site: Title, Tilte, Title - Company Name. Thank you! Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph.Lusso1 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
Blog posts not showing in serps for exact match title search
hi- my first client ranks #1 for the exact phrase of each blog post title the 2nd client doesnt rank anywhere when i search for the exact post title 2nd client has robots.txt User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro9
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ so that shouldnt noindex any posts right? his site ranks for many kw's - but oddly none of his blog posts are anywhere to be found - i dont mean for a kw search - i mean for searching for the entire title he doesnt rank anywhere in first 5 pages for any of 6-7 posts i checked any idea what could cause this? thanks0 -
Shortening Keywords in a title tag
in my title tag i want to have: 3D Renders of Office Refurbishment & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group which unfortunatly is longer than 70 characters, however, to make it fit in 70 characters i could put: 3D Renders of Office Refurb & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group Notice that refurbishment has been changed to refurb, would this be ok for SEO purposes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompleteOffice0 -
"Duplicate" Page Titles and Content
Hi All, This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me! SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site. The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/ Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page. The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France": http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated. http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle. There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in. What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification. Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome. Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0