Title tag solution for a med sized site
-
Its the same old story, we all know it well. I have a client that has a site with 20k+ pages (not too big) and traffic levels around 450k/month.
Now we have identified 15 pages with various conversion points/great backlink metrics etc. that we are going to explicitly target in the first round of recs. However, we are looking at about 18,000 dup title tags that I'd like to clean up.
The site is not on a CMS and in the past I've had the dev team write a script to adopt the h1 tag or the name of the page etc as the title tag. This can cause a problem when some of these pages that are being found in long tail search lose their positions etc. I'm more hesitant than ever to make this move with this current client because they get a ton of long tail traffic spread over a ton of original content they wrote.
How does everyone else usually handle this? Thoughts?
Thanks in advance Mozzers!
-
How about having your developers script something, that scrapes all 18.000 h1, h2, h3 for each article and store them in a database. Finding dupes then would be a piece of cake, even for a less experienced developer
You could easily export all your duplicates to csv and then manually rename them based on their content.
Dev time: about 1 day max. (Developed a lot of software myself and IMHO a good developer should get this up and running within 4 hours)
If you don't have toooooo many duplicate tags, correcting those in question shouldn't be taking too long aswell.
If you have done your chores
you could reimport your corrected title-tags to the database. Your developer could write a script in the meantime, that sets the title-tag of a page according to the title-tag you stated in your database.
Hope that helped
If you have further questions on this, just go ahead. Had a similar problem with 25k+ pages for a major health insurance and we figured out, that the best way to prevent problems was to do most of the work manually than with a script. Helped us a lot to stay within the budget and given timeframe.
-
This is sound advice. Test out a percentage of pages before rolling out the change site-wide.
I also agree that 18K duplicate titles isn't helping the site.
One thing I would do is review analytics and define the top X % pages and hand optimize those. The balance can be optimized via rules utilizing the system you outlined. As to whether to use the H1 or the file name or some other element, I'd probably lean towards the h1 as it would likely accurately describe the content and not be truncated or contain stop words.
-
-
Can you implement on a section or on a % of your pages first? then you can test the effect without risking your whole catalogue
-
Ryan - excellent points! The benefits of adding a CMS to this site would be quite good, at the very least for providing some sort of grounds for moving forward on a unified platform.
-
The 18k is a hard piece of the puzzle to wrap your mind around...I'd like to give more details there but can't...currently. Hopefully when this campaign starts to show results they will let me write a case for it...I'll be sure to share.
There is a "templating system" for various sections. However, as I mentioned, many developers have had their hands in it and didn't follow a standardized system.
I am considering EGOLs comment
Thanks!
-
Is there any form of standardization? I can't imagine 18k pages which were independently developed.
There should be a templating system or some logic which controls code common to all pages. Most pages should share the same header, footer and sidebar, along with standards for things like a canonicalization tag, title and meta description.
If that is not the case, the EGOL's comment should be considered. It is not reasonable to maintain a site which lacks standards.
-
It's possible that putting a reasonably intelligent human on the job for a couple of months could pay back big time. I'll bet a good title tag job would pull in thousands of dollars worth of sales every month.
-
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the response!
There was 18k title tag duplicates but top content that I can tell is being found in search is about 1,500 pages. Its not a forum site or a site with UGC. Its a very successful tech hardware company that has put out a lot of great unique content over time.
Determining the logic is the tough part because there isn't a lot of consistency throughout the site...different developers have had their hands in it over time.
-
What kind of site is it?
With 18k+ pages I will take a guess that it is a forum site. Definitely check with your forum software provider. There should be some form of "page container" which is used as a template for all the site's pages. If you can determine the logic you want to use, such as go with the post title or H1 tag, then you can modify the template according to your logic and take care of your entire site quickly and easily.
-
Thanks for the response! I should rephrase my question...
I'm either looking for tricks/tips others use in this situation or messages like yours that will give me the confidence to go for it haha.
I think we've all experienced the fear of doing what we know is technically correct and risk being at the mercy of the algo. I've gone this route a lot in the past but I've never done it on a site that gets traffic so deep into so many pages from search.
Have you ever gone the script route? If so, what did you have it pull to use as a title tag? Like I mentioned above, I usually have used h1's in the past..
-
If a lot of traffic is coming in through 18,000 pages that have duplicate title tags I am willing to bet that there will be a huge increase in the amount of traffic that those pages pull when unique and relevant title tags are put in place.
So, although there is a small chance that traffic will go down, I think that there is a much higher chance that traffic will immedately shoot up spectacularly - and the quality of that traffic might also improve.
I would archive the site, run a script to replace the title tags, see what happens. You can always put the old title tags back up if this doesn't work - but I bet it works great.
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
-
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Mobile Site Annotations
Our company has a complex mobile situation, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement bidirectional annotations and a mobile sitemap. Our mobile presence consists of three different "types" of mobile pages: Most of our mobile pages are mobile-specific "m." pages where the URL is completely controlled via dynamic parameter paths, rather than static mobile URLs (because of the mobile template we're using). For example: http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory. We have created vanity 301 redirects for the majority of these pages, that look like http://m.example.com/product that simply redirect to the previous URL. Six one-off mobile pages that do have a static mobile URL, but are separate from the m. site above. These URLs look like http://www.example.com/product.mobile.html Two responsively designed pages with a single URL for both mobile and desktop. My questions are as follows: Mobile sitemap: Should I include all three types of mobile pages in my mobile sitemap? Should I include all the individual dynamic parameter m. URLs like http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory in the sitemap, or is that against Google's recommendations? Bidirectional Annotations: We are unable to add the rel="canonical" tag to the m. URLs mentioned in section #1 above because we cannot add dynamic tags to the header of the mobile template. We can, however, add them to the .mobile.html pages. For the rel="alternate" tags on the desktop versions, though, is it correct to use the dynamic parameter URLs like http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory as the mobile version target for the rel="alternate" tag? My initial thought is no, since they're dynamic parameter URLs. Is there even any benefit to doing this if we can't add the bidirectional rel="canonical" on those same m. dynamic URLs? I'd be immensely grateful for any advice! Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Critical_Mass0 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Changing meta title dynamically e.g. with number of reviews in title. Is this a problem?
I would like to put the number of reviews in the meta title of a product page. I noticed that tripadvisor for example does the same. However I read in some places that people encountered problems with frequent title tag changes. Did you ever encounter problems by just changing numbers in title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Do you think it is really a problem if just the number of the reviews changes? what about putting number of reviews in the meta description instead?0 -
This site got hit but why..?
I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add. The site is Howtotradecommodities.co.uk and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50. Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels. On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again. This site has some amazing links http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesAgate
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/ That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion. I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank. As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings. I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be? [UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.0 -
Hierachy in a Title Tag Needed?
When coding the title tags of a website, is it important to note the hierarchy of the website so the search engine can find that page? So, for example, the title tag would be, for a subcategory: Webpage Subcategory>Category>Website name Does this help the search engine rankings at all? Or can the search engines figure out the hierarchy by reading a sitemap or the HTML readable navigation? Then you could focus on the descriptive keywords of the subcategory page for the title tag. Also, should you always include the site name in the title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConnellyPartners0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0 -
Wordpress Titles
My question is about long url titles, my client is using wordpress and the rankings are going well apart from two, which for some reason just wont move. After using some of the tools available on SEO moz which i have found very helpful I have spotted a re-occuring warning throughout the site, the titles, in word press you have this setting (below) page title : %page_title% | %blog_title% My question is my client has quite good brand online but I done want to impact this. The problem I have is that I have a Keyword in the title then the clients company name which is three words and takes up a lot of space. I am thinking about removing this but in two minds so i was kinda hoping for a bit of advice as this looks like a standard in wordpress. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820