Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How long do changes in title tags take to affect SEO?
-
This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro.
I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway.
I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.
-
It is a loaded question as there are many other more important facets than Title tags. So wary of answering. A site audit is where to start. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
Other factors to consider and monitor carefully include page loading speed, and the combinations of the url and H1's. For example I have seen sites penalized for having the same url, title tag, h1 and the meta description keyword stuffed with the same keyword. All that said title tags are still important though less so but to answer we would need context with what else is happening on site.
A quick check tool is website.grader.com On your specific question of how long until Title tags may impact usually after indexing so 2-7 days. Use fetch for google if wish to make happen sooner.
Hope that assists.
-
I take all aspects and changes to our sites very seriously, especially the Title tags & page content. I too adopted a Moz campaign and recently revamped our keywords to better target our product pages SEO. Analyze a Keyword is one of my favorite Moz tools. We have seen measurable improvements since that major update.
How Long to take effect? That depends on numerous variables; DA, Traffic, Links, Outside Advertising, etc... when I want faster results, I submit the updated page for indexing through Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps

KJr
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
-
Is one page with long content better than multiple pages with shorter content?
(Note, the site links are from a sandbox site and has very low DA or PA) If you look at this page, you will see at the bottom a lengthy article detailing all of the properties of the product categories in the links above. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-s/432.htm My question is, is there more SEO value in having the one long article in the general product category page, or in breaking up the content and moving the sub-topics as content to the more specific sub-category pages? e.g. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Button-Head-Socket-s/1579.htm
Moz Pro | | AspenFasteners
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Cap-Screws-s/331.htm
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Captive-Panel-Scre-s/1559.htm0 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
SEO Yoast data export
Just thought I would give something back. (Is this the right place!) I use Wordpress with the excellent SEO Yoast plugin. I needed a way of extracting the focus keywords that I have entered onto my pages along with the url for use on the SEOmoz On-page Optimisation tool. So I created GetYoastData which outputs to the browser the required data (and a bit more) that can be saved into an csv (Excel) file. Hope you find it useful - Yes it's not polished and yes it might output a blank line now and again but it's fairly useful. http://deanandrews.uk/get-yoast-seo-data/
Moz Pro | | DeanAndrews0 -
Some questions on Canonical tag AND 301 redirect
Hi everyone, I'm new here - always loved SEOMoz and glad to be part of the Pro community now. I have 2 questions regarding the Canonical URL tag. Some background info: We used to run an OsCommerce store, and recently migrated to Magento. In doing so, we right away created 301 redirects of the old category pages (OsCommerce) to the new category pages (Magento) via the Magento admin. Example: www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
301 redicrected to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html In Magento admin, we have enabled the Canonical tag for all product and category pages. Here's how Magento sets up the Canonical tag: The URL of interest which we want to rank is:
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html However Magento sets up the canonical tag on this page to point to:
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html When using the SEOMoz On Page Report Card, it pick this up as an error because the Canonical tag is pointing to a different URL. However, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the URL being pointed to
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
has a 301 redirect to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html
which is the URL we wan to rank. So because we set up a 301 redirect of the old-page to the new-page, on the new-page the canonical tag points to the old-page. Question 1)
What are you opinions on this? Do you think this method of setting up the Canonical tag is acceptable? Second question... We use pagination for category pages, so if we have 50 products in one category, we would have 5 pages of 10 products. The URL's would be: www.example.com/new-widget-category.html (which is the SAME as ?p=1)
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=1
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=2
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=3
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=4
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=5 Now ALL the URLs above have the canonical tag set as:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/new-widget-category" /> However, the content of each page (page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is different because different products are displayed. So far most what I read regarding the Canonical tag is that it is used for pages that have the same content but different URLs. I would hope that Google would combine the content of all 5 pages and view the result as a single URL www.example.com/new-widget-category Question 2) Is using the canonical tag appropriate in the case described above? Thanks !0 -
How long does a crawl take?
A crawl of my site started on the 8th July & is still going on - is there something wrong???
Moz Pro | | Brian_Worger1 -
SEO PowerSuite - best kept SEO secret or just bullsh..?!?
I've come across a lot of SEO tools in the last 5-6 years. And there are many great tools out there! I don't believe in the one-tool-fits-all. Among the tools I make use of are Raven Tools and Searchmetrics (great audit and market analysis tool!), and the tools in here, of course. In my search for a better ranking report tool I came across Rank Tracker from SEO PowerSuite. That seems like a great tool in category with AWR; but I am not able tell so as I am not a power user. Well, here is where I am going: I then tested the rest of the PowerSuite and it seems as a great product. But searching for the tools in here, and nothing shows up. Silence. Also elsewhere in other serious places. Why is that? It is a collective secret, shhhh, don't tell 🙂. Or is it is just crap? I know they have a bad reputation in regard to prices and updates. What do you guys think?
Moz Pro | | Danni0 -
Missing Meta Description tags?
I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up.
Moz Pro | | notebooks
Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here? http://notebooks.com0 -
Title tag on sitemap.xml
The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !
Moz Pro | | eyepaq1