Duplication in Meta Titles
-
Hi,
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch.Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition.
For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet CartridgesThey will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink.What are your opinions of the fact that:
a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title.The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first.
Cheers all!
-
Something in the title you sent triggered a thought and after checking I realized you're dealing with a .co.uk domain. I have found the .co.uk Google to be far more tolerant of heavy keyword use and even link spam so you're probably in a battle with folks who are indeed keyword stuffing or worse and finding yourself having to do the same just to keep up.
It's a bit of a slippery slope but I will admit that even some recent work I did in the UK required a slightly more heavy handed approach to SEO than I'd typically do. So while I wouldn't recommend it in the US, the title you're suggesting will probably work well in the UK.
Cheers !
Dave
-
Many thanks Dave.
To be honest I'm thinking about disregarding the 55 limit altogether and just keeping the length sensible and popping the important keywords towards the beginning of the title so it doesn't matter too much if / when it gets truncated.
For example, something like the following for a product listing:
'Canon PGI-520BK Compatible Inkjet Cartridge. Buy PGI-520 Ink at Refresh Cartridges.'
This covers the keywords Canon, Inkjet, Ink, Cartridge, Cartridges and the name of the product twice along with the inclusion of 'Buy' and the Company Name.
I don't think it looks hideously spammy but please do feel free to give me a slap if you think I may be about to make a terrible mistake
Thanks again.
-
Good question. I'm not sure exactly how I'd write it as it would depend on how your products are arranged. If you have pages for each of the different cartridges so you can target terms such as LC980BK independently then I'd probably go with something like:
Buy Brother DCP-197C Ink Cartridges from Domain.com
Of course he structure would differ by printer type as this model doesn't have any searches for phrases including "inkjet" so I'd skip including that. I also like the word "Buy" because if I'm looking up cartridges that's what I want to do.
Obviously testing is key though.
Hope that helps and best of luck ...
Dave
-
Many thanks for such a thorough and informative response. Pretty much none of our titles need to extend past 55 characters, it's just a case of whether it would be beneficial to cram some more potential keywords in
If I can be so cheeky, if you were to rewrite the example given of a competitors title 'Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink' to something more to your pallette what would it be? Obviously I appreciate you more than likely have no experience of our niche, I'm just curious.Thanks again for taking the time to reply.
-
It's always important to remember that every scenario is a bit different and that the title tag rules outlined by Moz are meant to be guidelines as opposed to gospel. There are times when the title may have to extend past the recommended character count though it's also important to remember that Google uses pixels as opposed to characters so some titles can have more characters than others.
Dr. Pete (from Moz himself) created a great tool at https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool that you can use to test titles. Whenever I hit one that needs to extend past the visual I like to use the tool to make sure that at least my marketing message is presented properly.
I'd personally focus on clicks and that might be something you want to dig in to. While your rankings went down it may be worth checking if your clickthroughs for a query to that page went up as a percentage of what would be expected given your position. If they did then you'll want to look at ways to boost your rankings with the given titles so when you do recover you recover with a higher clickthrough rate, if not then you may want to run some limited tests on some products to see what happens if you extend the titles back to what they were. I mention this to insure that there wasn't a coincidence issue occurring where your rankings dropped due to an update that was poorly timed with the title changes. It would be wise to look through your analytics, find the time of the drop and compare that with the algo change history page (also kept up-to-date by Dr. Pete ... busy guy) to help safeguard against reacting to the wrong issue.
I personally don't have a big issue with some limited keyword duplication provided it still reads right. I don't like what your competitor's title is but then ... I don't have to - only the searcher does.
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
-
Meta Data Question
Hi There, I am working on the umbraco CMS and we have a Menu page which sits under one page on the CMS. When accessing this page on the front end and navigating between the food menu / drinks menu, the url changes depending on which content you are on, however i have only one place to input a meta title and description meaning that it is seeing them as duplicate content as both the drinks menu url and food menu url are showing the same meta data. Hopefully this makes sense, does anyone have anything similair where a url change happens when content within the page changes.
Technical SEO | | AlexStanleyGK0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Different meta descriptions for same page
Hi Depending what terms I put into Google I am seeing a different meta description for exactly the same page. I have checked Umbraco CMS and everything seems in working order. Is there a reason this would be happening? Anyone else had trouble like this?
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
All META descriptions gone
Hi there, Since almost a week now, all of my optmized META descriptions has been gone in Google. The last few years Google has always shown all of the optimized META descriptions. My website is an ecommerce site (phone accessories) and all pages have its own unique content (url, text, title, description) and score well in Google. The META descriptions are created by using a template like this: At [brandname] you find lots of [variable category product] * USP 1 * USP 2 * USP 3 All META descriptions differ from each other only by the variable category product. Something tells me this is an effect of the Panda 4.0 update. I tested with a category page by replacing the META description for a 100% unique one. Then I asked Google (via Webmaster tools) to reindex the page. Today the new description got indexed. This means uniqueness is important. My question is: how do I get the optimized META descriptions back? Creating real unique descriptions (means not using a template) for every page is very hard for a webhop since all category pages have the same message to tell (only difference is the type of product), I want to use USP's, and META descriptions of all productpages have been lost too (over 15000 different products). Please help!
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Thanks in advance. Marcel0 -
Duplicate title tags being caused by upper case and lower case version of urls'
Hi GWT is reporting lots of duplicate titles for a clients new site. Mainly these are due to 2x different versions of the url, one with words starting with an upper case character and the other all lower case. Clients dev saying this has something to do with windows server and is ok! Is this correct or should i be telling them to delete and then 301 redirect all upper case versions to the lower case (since lower case better practice) and that will deal with the reported dupe titles ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Problem of possible duplicate title tag and description. Help me!
Hi everybody, I'm optimizing this huge website that has a lot of identical categories for differente locations. I'm trying to find a smart way to write title and description for these categories, changing the location as a variable on the title and description phrase. Here some examples: Title: Attractions in [CITY]. Sightseeings, monuments and museums in [CITY]. Description: Find travel ideas and suggestions for [CITY]. On [NAME OF THE WEBSITE] you can find a lot of attractions, monuments and sightseeing off the beaten path in [CITY]. Changing only the name of the CITY on these Titles and Descriptions, am I running the risk of duplicate title and description? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | OptimizedGroup0 -
My number of duplicate page title and temporary redirect warnings increased after I enabled Canonical urls. Why? Is this normal?
After receiving my first SEO moz report, I had some duplicate page titles and temporary redirects. I was told enabling Canonical urls would take of this. I enabled the Canonical URLs, but the next report showed that both of those problems had increased three fold after enabled the canonical urls! What happened?
Technical SEO | | btsseo780 -
Testing for duplicate content and title tags
Hi there, I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please? Thanks, Claire
Technical SEO | | SEOvet0