Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
-
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?
I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this.
I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO.
NIck
-
Hi Nick,
I noticed that as well it is definitely in the header, but it is currently not been found by tools that mimic google bot.
I am running a DeepCrawl.co.uk scan of the site as we speak I will post it when it is finished.
-
Thomas,
I looked at the page source and found the the title tag; it sits at the very end of the head section; not sure if that makes a difference or not. Do you know if there are any instances where we can see the title tag in the page source but some how it is not seen by search engines?
Nick
-
Beautiful Thomas! Thank you so much for taking the time to analyze the site. I may have to look into recommendation of authoritydev.com
-
It's true that it wouldn't matter to the user, such as 'above the fold' real estate. But, to the bots do pay attention to the parts invisible to the user and should be optimized too.
-
The page that you are having trouble with is not showing up as rendering a title in more than one tool
** title tag search**
Screaming Frog
** crawl review**
** internal URLs**
** feedthebot.com**
** I went deeper**
** your server is either slow or the coding is killing it is most likely the coding.**
Google pagespeed score
68 out of 100
This webpage is on the slow side of average. See below the reasons why your page is slow.Load time
Page begins to be seen in: 1582 milliseconds
I have pasted it a lot of graphics below in order to show you that the URL
http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
is not showing a title tag to search engines nor is it something four tools have been able to find the title tag regarding that link.
More disturbing is amount of URLs without title tags in the more in-depth crawls.
My strongest suggestion is that you contact a developer.
I can recommend the authoritydev.com
they are very good.
Sincerely,
Thomas
EX4Lb9W.png BwzRStn.png 3g0HEF5.png eDVEJhJ.png voNKl6Q.png YuCMcOc.png panniPZ.png
-
I mean I'm not saying that it's not possible, but above the fold is relevant to the user because it's actually something they see. The section is completely invisible to a user, hence shouldn't be relevant.
-
I honestly don't think that the <title>tag location is your issue.</p> <p>One issue that I'm seeing is that your page load time is pretty abysmal. According to tools.pingdom.com your page load time is around 8 seconds. This probably has to do with the massive amount of code that your site is using. That is at least one thing you may look into improving.</p></title>
-
Yeah, maybe not. But, 'above the fold' is understood to be better real estate on a web page - why not higher up on a document too?
-
I'm not sure that I agree with this. If this were about the
or any element that is actually visibile on the page then I'd be inclined to agree but there is really no reason that you should need to put the <title>tag higher up as long as it is within the <head> section. It really shouldn't affect anything in my opinion.</p></title>
-
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?
Yes, location does matter.
Let's consider this extreme scenario: A competitor and you are competing for the same term and have the following...
- The term being targeted is exactly the same
- Both you and your competitors' domain have the same authority
- You both have the same inbound links and internal link structure
- Both properties' content is optimized
Basically, you and your competitor have the same internal/external optimizations - so all other factors are equal aside from the <title>location.</p> <p>Pages are rendered from top to bottom. Crawlers read pages from top to bottom. Your competitors' <title> tag is higher on the page than yours. When Google crawls the site, they understand this (the location of the title tag in relation to the page). How will they decide between your page and your competitors' page? Your competitor puts the title tag up higher on the page than you do, it must be more important.</p> <p>Now, this is a very extreme scenario that is super difficult to replicate (you'd need to control both sites to do it properly). But, using this extreme can show why location of the <title> tag is important. It may be a very slight difference, but sometimes that is all that is needed.</p></title>
-
As long as it is in the section of your page. Crawlers look for tagging information in this section first so it may be missed if it is anywhere else.
If you are concerned about the amount of code in the top head section, you could move all that javascript into a external js file and reference it.
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
-
Blog page won't get indexed
Hi Guys, I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now. I found this in the robots.txt file: Allow: / Disallow: /kitchenhandle/ Disallow: /blog/comments/ Disallow: /blog/author/ Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/ I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Sitemap issue? 404's & 500's are regenerating?
I am using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to generate a sitemap on http://www.atozqualityfencing.com. Last month, I had an associate create redirects for over 200 404 errors. She did this via the .htaccess file. Today, there are the same amount of 404s along with a number of 503 errors. This new Wordpress website was constructed on a subdirectory and made live by simply entering some code into the .htaccess file in order to direct browsers to the content we wanted live. In other words, the content actually resides in a subdirectory titled "newsite" but is shown live on the main url. Can you tell me why we are having these 404 & 503 errors? I have no idea where to begin looking.
Technical SEO | | JanetJ0 -
New website's ranking dropped
Hi, Im working on brand new website i didn't even start my link building yet, just added to local directories i slowly started getting my ranking on 3rd page of Google then few weeks ago my ranking fell for all the keywords so now the website doesn't even rank on 10th page. Its been like this for a few weeks now. Here's the website Screenshot http://screencast.com/t/wDWk8sxLw Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
Google changing title tags to branded
Hi guys and gals, i noticed in the results today Google has been changing my title tags so that brand: is in the front of it all. This is not in the code but my title tag structure site-wide is keywords and then always | brand on the end. Why has this happened does anyone know? does it affect my first keyword in the title tag, i guess Google might do it as it recognises the brand and wants users to know it?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Testing for duplicate content and title tags
Hi there, I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please? Thanks, Claire
Technical SEO | | SEOvet0 -
Title Tag Wordpress
I need to know how can I personalize the title tag individually in my categories?
Technical SEO | | nafera20 -
Canonical tag used on several pages?
Is it a bad idea to use rel=canonical from several pages back to one (if you are planning on no-indexing them)? Does this concentrate the “link juice” from those several pages back to one?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0