Need to shorten and change site-wide meta titles (50.000 pages). OK to do all at once?
-
Just noticed that google completely screws up our meta titles in the SERPs. Google decided to show titles which are not understandable to visitors and worst of all even shows titles in different languages than the actual page. The words of the displayedf titles are nowhere on the page (actually they are parts of old title tags that we stopped using 6 months ago and that we used on different pages). Pages are crawled weekly.
All our meta titles are a bit longer than the 70 character limit, so I plan to rephrase and shorten them so that they are all max. 66 characters. Dynamically we choose different variations of title texts based on character length of keywords.
Having titles that fit into SERPs without cutting are supposed to have less probability to be changed by google.
I heard some people reporting loss of rankings after site-wide meta title changes. Especially since we changed title tags sitewide already about 6 months ago I am a bit concerned.
How would you proceed? Just do the site-wide change all at once?
-
thanks Tim.
started launch of new shortened optimized titles today for most important pages. -
Based on your description, there are serious problems in how the Title is displayed in the SERPs (wrong syntax and language). If this is the case, you need to fix that immediately. If not, you will likely suffer a bigger problem - no clicks and your CTR plummets (a trust factor). You will start dropping out of the rankings fast if you competitors are getting those clicks. Nobody clicks on faulty titles because it often is tied to a faulty site.
I agree with Takeshi that normally you would want to segment and test before committing to a massive overhaul, but it sounds like you are in a more urgent situation right now.
-
It depends how fast your site is crawled. See what your crawl rate is in Google Webmaster Tools, vs the number of pages you have. Manually check to see if the pages you updated have been cached, and wait a few days after that.
-
Takeshi, thanks.
How long would you wait and monitor ranking changes before to roll out sitewide after first test?
Not sure whether keeping changes to minimum will reduce risk (so mainly shortening without much other improvement/changes)?
Titles are all unique.
-
The title tag is one of the most important tags on your page, from a search engine perspective, so I would proceed with caution. You might want to start with a smaller set of pages to see if it has any impact on search rankings, and be ready to revert to your old titles if there is any negative impact. Also, make sure that there are no duplicates among the 50K title tags.
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
-
Do I need title elements on all my forum pages?
I have a forum that I'm working on and there are a lot of pages that don't need to be found in search. In fact, I'm even thinking of de-indexing some of them such as the following pages: Registration Login Member Cancellation Member Billing There are also a lot of pages that are only viewable to paid members. Do they all need title tags and meta descriptions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BroDino0 -
Company Name in Home Page Title? If and Where?
My guess is you want to do the {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title? (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name? The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company. But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title? So many factors to consider. Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9641 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Site Penalty After Changing Hosting Companies?
In one week's time, we've dropped from #3 on Page 1 of Google to Page 7 (similar on Bing). It looks like our traffic started to drop on 9/5 to 9/7 and has been a steady, rapid decline ever since. 1000s of pages are indexed, just suddenly ranking poorly -- even for branded terms. History:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddwilliamson
--In January, we switched to a web redesign & new domain
--In August, our hosting server was slow & kept crashing so we migrated our site to a new hosting company. We're not currently using the old hosting server. All domains, redirects, .htaccess files should now be correct and site speeds are improved.
--In early September, our NEW hosting company had a DNS issue causing more slow speeds and downtime for about 1 wk. Originally they thought it was htaccess so they changed our htaccess file - no luck - then discovered it was DNS. DNS issue was finally resolved on September 6th -- one day before the penalty/traffic issue seemed to begin.
-- According to GWMT, it looks like there were crawls completed around 9/4-9/5 What we've tried:
--Webmaster Tools - Googlebot dropoff since 9/5 (see attached screenshot). Nothing flagged. No site health alerts. Fetch as Google works. No manual webspam actions found.
-- W3C link checker, screamingfrog SEO spider, Xenu Link Sleuth, OSE (found some 4xx errors so we've updated those links)
-- Majestic SEO - backlinks reviewed 9/3 to 9/8
-- spoke to two different Adwords salespeople; unable to help
-- Bing Webmaster Tools
-- not showing organic search traffic since 9/6
-- 15% fewer pages crawled this month
-- top keywords are very odd -- stuff like "mt1 google apis" and "aaremel"
-- there are 4xx crawl errors under Crawl Information. We've fixed those URLs but they still appear in Webmaster Tools
-- some missing h1's and meta's, and dup titles, which we're working to fix
-- spike in crawl errors 9/11-9/12 and again on 9/14-9/15 It's been one thing after another this year, but all issues are now resolved with the exception of this newly-discovered penalty. We also have sites on a separate hosting server (with a different hosting company) that rank just fine. googlebot-crawls.jpg0 -
2 page titles, 1 url in Google SERPS: WTF!?!?
Hey guys, Hope everybody is having a good day. Today i came across something i have never seen in the serps before that i would like to share and getting feedback on. When i search for 'woonverzekering' on google.nl #1 is: **Url: ** www.independer.nl/woonverzekering/intro.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrizeWize
**page titel: **Woonverzekering - Independer.nl When i search for 'woonhuisverzekering' on google.nl #1 is: **Url: ** www.independer.nl/woonverzekering/intro.aspx
page titel: Woonhuisverzekering? Vergelijk alle soorten woonverzekeringen - Independer.nl So basically 2 different queries show the same url with 2 different page titles in the serps. The only 'weird' thing i could find was a nobreakspace in the page title code: Woonhuisverzekering? Vergelijk alle soorten woonverzekeringen - Independer.nl I'm i missing something completely obvious here? Is this a commonly used technique. Is the page title getting chopped up because of ? What are they doing to get 2 page title results on 1 url?0 -
Page Titles... question about which is better
Hi, I'm kind of a newbie and I'm working on an e commerce website. I would love to be able to optimize the site so that the keyword "dog boutique" was ranking for the homepage. B/C a lot of the pages call from php to create the meta data, most of generated page titles look like "Product Name, Category - Moondoggie Dog Boutique" My question is would it be more helpful to just have Moondoggie Dog Boutique on the page title on the page I would like to rank for "dog boutique" and use Moondoggie Inc. or Just Moondoggie in it's place on all of the other pages? Would this help or make it worse? Thanks! KristyO If you would like to see hte site: http://www.moondoggieinc.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO0 -
Magneto site with many pages
just finsihed scan to a magento site. off course I am getting thousand of pages that are dynamic. search pages and other. checking with site command on Google I see 154,000 results which pages it is recommended to block? some people are talking about blocking the search pages and some actually talking about allowing them? any answer on this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0