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
-
Adding Canonical Tags in WYSIWYG Section of Subscription Based Sites
Our company has a paid subscription-based site that only allows us to add HTML in the WYSIWYG section, not in the backend of each individual page. Because we are an e-commerce site, we have many duplicate page issues. Is there a way for us to add or hide the canonical code in the WYSIWYG section instead of us having to make all of our pages significantly different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | expobranders0 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Temporarily shut down a site
What would be the best way to temporarily shut down a site the right way and not have a negative impact on SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LibertyTax1 -
Backlinking 3 sites from same domain and backlinking main site too
Hello, we have 4 sites, in which 1 is a main site and rest 3 are niche sites All these 3 sites have dofollow links to main site from home page We got a high quality backlink - through which all 3 niche sites have got it from that domain Is it worth to add backlink from that domain to main site too, despite the fact the 3 sites already have recvd it and they all link to main site many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Using standard title and description tags with rich snippets are there potential conflicts
Recently I've employing rich snippets using the guides from schema.org I find them a great way to let the search engines understand the content of my web pages, also author and publisher tags are all thrown into the migreat great love it. My question however is what to do with the existing title and description tags? Should they be left in? Do they cause conflicts with the search engines? Should I just ignore this gut feeling and leave them in. Any insights into the use of schema and a standard tags appreciated. Best David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Rel Alternate tag and canonical tag implementation question
Hello, I have a question about the correct way to implement the canoncial and alternate tags for a site supporting multiple languages and markets. Here's our setup. We have 3 sites, each serving a specific region, and each available in 3 languages. www.example.com : serves the US, default language is English www.example.ca : serves Canada, default language is English www.example.com.mx : serves Mexico, default language is Spanish In addition, each sites can be viewed in English, French or Spanish, by adding a language specific sub-directory prefix ( /fr , /en, /es). The implementation of the alternate tag is fairly straightforward. For the homepage, on www.example.com, it would be: -MX” href=“http://www.example.com.mx/index.html” /> -MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/fr/index.html“ />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amiee
-MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/en/index.html“ />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/fr/index.html” />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/es/index.html“ />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/fr/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/es/index.html” /> My question is about the implementation of the canonical tag. Currently, each domain has its own canonical tag, as follows: rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/index.html"> <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.ca="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>
<link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com.mx="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> I am now wondering is I should set the canonical tag for all my domains to: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> This is what seems to be suggested on this example from the Google help center. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 What do you think?0