Would Changing the Titles of Root Categories Be Bad?
-
I have researched some more effective keywords to change my root category titles to. I am wondering if it would be a bad idea to change these titles considering all the things that could go wrong. From what i'm gathering there are a LOT of things that can go wrong but at the same time these things do need to be changed sometime!
Is this a good or a bad idea & why?
What could go wrong?
Should I try changing the category titles one at a time instead of risking every one of my keywords / category titles not working out in the serps right away?
-
I change title tags on our massive ecommerce site all the time, it's called optimization
A lot of times I see an improvement in rankings just by doing this.
-
That is a good idea but in this case that pretty much means redirecting every page on my website
-
Good point
-
If your changes do affect the urls then make sure you have working 301 redirects ready so the old urls still work.
-
If it's just the title tag on the pages then you might as well try swapping out one or two and testing your changes.
If those titles affect the URL of the page or of any other pages then you'll need to consider these changes. Changing URLs is the same as creating a totally new page so obviously this is a bad thing.
If it is literally just a title tag change...I'd try it, you can always roll it back after a week.
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
-
Site name in page title - leave it or remove it?
Hi all, Recently came across some authority blog (quicksprout to be precise) which stated that apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content. example "How to blog | Example Site name" This mostly is the issue with tags and categories pages as it shows on Moz issues. Is that really a problem and site name should be taken off them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
Category page canonical tag
I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice. Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page. There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example: /range.html?p=2
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson9
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price Is it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag? After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated. Chris.1 -
Duplicate Page Title issues
Hello, I have a duplicate page title problem: Crawl Diagnostics Reported that my website got **sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Title **between:
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs.html and these URLs below:http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-2
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-3
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-4
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-5 I don't know why, because I have already implemented rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to canonical pages. Please give me an advice!0 -
Why Does Google Keep Changing My Page Titles?
I know Google has been doing this for quite some time but how do you "control" what Google will display as your page name? Lots of my pages come up with a title like "[searched keyword] - [website name]" in the search results. I usually a huge drop in CTR when this happens. On the other hand, there are some pages which have kept their title intact in the search results. So what gives? How come one page's title is changed and the other is not?
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Title
When you are in Error status for Duplicate Page Titles - but it is because of the root domain: Example.com and Example.com/index How to you go about changing the title of the same page without looking un-natural. My client has built his site with the - index file pulling to the root - but the crawlers are seeing TWO separate pages - when in reality they are the same. Riddle me this batman?
On-Page Optimization | | Chenzo0 -
Title Tag Over Optimization
Hey, I've read that adding the company name to the title tag was a waste of space since the more words the less weight each one has, with all this over optimization preventive measures, should I rewrite the title tags format with company names? and if so should it be (company name): (naturally organized keywords) (naturally organized keyword) | (Company name). or can I keep it just naturally organized keywords Also I used to do (keyphrase) - (keyphrase) instead of commas, should I fix this? I asked this question on Randy's post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday but didn't really get an answer. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nrv0 -
Duplicate Title & Content in WordPress
I'm getting a lot of Crawl Errors due to duplicate content and duplicate title because of category and tag posts in WordPress. I rebuilt the sitemap and said to exclude category and tags, should that clear up the issue? I've also went through and did NO INDEX and NO FOLLOW for all categories and posts. Any thoughts on this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | seantgreen0 -
Duplicate page titles
We have search results pages on our site. They share the same page title, there is no real differentiator between the result pages, other than page 1, page 2 etc. How do we de-dup the titles? just add page 1/2/3 etc to the end of them?
On-Page Optimization | | lilibooz0