Help choosing titles
-
Good evening guys, I changed my titles last month, in preparation for the over optimisation penalty and the result was an instant and quite dramatic loss in traffic.
I believe the reason is, the change resulted in a lot of duplicate titles.
My website is similar to deviant art, but for mobile phones. So the titles include the brand of mobile phone for example.
The titles were: Upload name + Brand + Content type - 3 tags - FILEID
So an example would be Black Nokia wallpaper - black, abstract, grey - 12345
I changed them to Black Nokia wallpaper by artist name on domain name.
But this resulted in thousands of duplicate titles and a dramatic loss in traffic. For example a user could upload 20 black wallpapers.
With this in mind, I need to change my titles and fast. But I don't want to make another mistake.
The one I am quite keen to try is:
Black Nokia Wallpaper - Tag1, tag2 wallpapers - on domain name.
So the main variable would be the name of the upload and then the 2 tags, to mix things up a little.
Another option would be to throw the file ID in there somewhere? As that will always be unique. Perhaps the file ID could be in the place of the "wallpapers" after the two tags?
I'd like to keep the domain name, for branding reasons.
Any other suggestions are warmly welcomed.
Thanks a lot.
-
Jeremy, I could not agree more. It was among the worst decisions I've made in the seven years of working with websites.
It was completely knee jerk and plain dumb.
I think the drop was likely partly due to such a site wide change and then due to the duplicate pages that then resulted.
Thanks for the input.
-
The drop in rankings could be just because you changed the titles. For some reason google doesn't like it when you change titles, perhaps because it signals them that you're trying to change them in order to rank?
Anyhow, I've changed titles on one of our home pages twice in the last 3 or so months. I wish I would have just left it alone...each time my rankings dropped, then started to climb. I'm basically where I was to begin with now before I changed anything and I'm leaving it alone now!
Anyhow, I'd make one more change to get rid of most of the duplicates and then leave it alone. That said, I like:
Upload Name - tag, tag - Brand (fileid)
-
Haha well yes, in this case, optimal would be not too optimised.
Testing worries me, as I fear Google will think I'm trying to reverse engineer and smack me with the biggest stick they have.
I am hoping my first change, has the desired result.
-
But not too optimal right?
I don't have any suggestions apart from test your new variations and see. Although it sounds like introducing stricter naming conventions might help as well.
-
Oh, also I really want to still include my brand name in the title. Which wasn't present prior.
-
Hi Ben, the titles don't effect how things are linked internally, that's all dealt with in other ways.
I could of course roll back the titles to exactly how they were before. But as I'm changing them, I just wanted to ensure they were as optimal as possible.
Thanks
-
Do your title tags also determine how you link internally and are they inserted dynamically into content on the page?
If not then (and let me know if I'm being dim-witted here) I don't see anything massively wrong with the first set of titles. Could you roll back and do a quick test to see if it works?
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
-
Optimal Page Titles to avoid cannibalization
Hi there Moz community I spent today researching optimal "page titles" to avoid cannibalization of keyword. Why? Because when i set up my site previously for another industry I obviously well and truly stuffed it up with page titles that were different, but still too similar ie field marketing project setup, field marketing saas, field marketing reporting. I never ranked once for that term. Consequently, we nearly went broke in the process. Hence my research, which led me to Rands video and other information about choosing the best page title. However, I came across two opposing name theories. So, before i make a colossal error again, could someone please clearly clarify which would be the best way for me to proceed. First option(according to Rand's video about the snowboard website) Main page title - Field reporting and mobile data collection (same keywords as site title?) Subsequent pages - titles - (p1) Field reporting for construction (2) field reporting for medical (p3) field reporting for retail (or is that cannibalizing "field reporting"?) Second option Main landing page - Field reporting Solutions for your business, for your industry Subsequent page titles - (p1) defect inspection & reporting for construction (p2) incident reporting for medical But my quandary is that I wanted to rank for mobile data collection and field reporting for these industries. So how do I write the page titles without firstly keyword stuffing, secondly avoid cannibalization and lastly, not too long? Any explanation that specifically says yes or no would be greatly appreciated Thanks in advance and happy friday. Sharon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sharonrice0 -
Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?
Greetings, I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
tags in the title tag. Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title> My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric0 -
Ratings Snippets Gone? ( Help! )
Hello We had good traffic from ratings ( stars ) . I have added Offer details in the rich snippets in various currencies - the snippet testing tool likes it , but for some reason the stars on my site have completely dissapeared and been gone for almost a week. I need the offer information in there for google shopping automatic updates and google told me that it's implemented correctly for the shopping part.. but I really don't know what to do about this. Any ideas why would be really appreciated. http://www.return2health.net/yeast-imbalance/threelac-candida-defence/ Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Problems with a website-help
Soooooo, I did a crawl report on this site : www.greatwesternflooring.com and this was what was on the report. This is a dnn site. I'm guessing the site has a redirect loop given the http status code. Can anyone help me with a fix. (the developers have said there is no redirect on the site......clearly there is....) | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com/ | 2015-01-07T21:32:25Z | 609 : Redirect to already-visited URL received for page request. | Error attempting to request page; see title for details. | 302 | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com | <colgroup><col width="319"> <col width="144"> <col width="378"> <col span="39" width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Britewave
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |0 -
Need help in Title tags
Hi I have word press site and it has 24 pages and the main keywords is Stairlifts there are various kind and type of stairlifts and all the 24 page has the title tag stairslifts , i have tried to make each unique but i cannot avoid using the keyword stairslift. Will that have a negative impact if my main keyword is stairlifts. My target page for stairlifts is the home page. Any suggestions please Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Help needed regarding 1:1 Redirection
Hi all, We are currently working on a very large site having approximately 5000+ pages and its going to be 301 redirected to a new domain. For this we need to redirect each and every page on a 1:1 basis as mentioned in the Webmaster Central guide. Now the site is in flt file and not in CMS and is becoming very tough to set manually redirection for these pages. The site is hosted in a Windows server and using IIS web config file. Now any help regarding any automated or easy way to do the 1:1 redirection will be appreciated. Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
Does title text of homepage effect ranking of sub pages?
Question is pretty much summed up in the title. I realize that title text on a specific page can effect the ranking of that page. But what I'm getting a feeling of lately is that google uses the title text of your homepage to effect the ranking of the site on a whole. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg1 -
Are Facebook links really helpful?
If they are no follow, how can I benefit? If Google isn't using this data, than why would we bother to LIKE anyone or anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0