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
-
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 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
Are ALL duplicate title tags bad??
We’ve had some success recently by reducing the number of duplicate title tags on our website. We have managed to fix all the simple cases but there are a number of stubborn examples that we don’t know how to fix. A lot of the duplicate tags come from the website’s forums. Many questions have been asked multiple times over the years where the user has phrased the question in the same way. This has led to many cases where different forums posts have the same title tag. For example, there are six title tags with the words ‘’need help”! These are being highlighted as duplicates and currently we have several thousand of these. Would this be a problem? I’d be tempted to say that we should leave them as they don’t seem unnatural to me. One solution other solution we are considering is to append the forum name to the question to any post after the original, falling back to appending the date if that doesn’t distinguish it. Do people think that this is a good solution to implement or would it be better to leave these duplicate title tags as they are? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Google penguin penalty(s), please help
Hi MozFans, I have got a question out of the field about www.coloringpagesabc.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Question is why the rankings and traffic are going down down down the last 4 months. Costumer thinks he got hit by google penguin update(s). The site has about 600 page’s/posts al ‘optimized’ for old seo:
- Almost all posts are superb optimized for one keyword combination (like … coloring pages) there is a high keyword density on the keyword titles and descriptions are all the same like: <keyword>and this is the rest of my title, This is my description <keyword>and i like it internal linking is all with a ‘perfect’ keyword anchor text there is a ok backlink profile, not much links to inner pages
- there are social signals the content quality is low The site to me looks like a seo over optimized content farm Competition:
When I look at the competition. The most coloring pages websites don’t offer a lot of content (text) on there page. The offer a small text and the coloring pages (What it is about :-)) How to get the rankings back:
What I was thinking to do. rewrite the content to a smaller text. Low keyword density on the keyword and put the coloring pages up front. rewrite all titles and descriptions to unique titles and descriptions Make some internal links to related posts with a other anchor text. get linkbuilding going on inner pages get more social signals Am I on the right track? I can use some advise what to do, and where to start. Thanks!!</keyword></keyword> Maarten0 -
Google Recon Request 4 Failed - This is crazy. HELP!
We run a niche website selling sunglasses at www.aluminumeyewear.com. I've been trying to resolve a 'Failed Quality Guidelines' message since May. My 4th recon request has just failed and I've exhausted all changes that I believe I need to make. I rely on this site to pay my bills etc so obviously I really need to get this resolved. I would be grateful if someone from Google could actually point out whats wrong instead of an unhelpful auto response.Steps taken.1. Rewrote content as it was a bit thin. Recon failed.2. Removed old products that couldn't be reached from every page. Recon failed.3. Submitted back link audit and added 'sitemap' link to footer. Recon Failed.4. Removed 40+ old urls that existed from old Yahoo! store (didn't realize they still existed). Recon failed.I felt sure #4 would resolve the issue so feeling pretty low right now that it didn't. That being said doing a site:aluminumeyewear.com it looks like I missed one of them which was http://www.aluminumeyewear.com/demora/black/, however it just returns a 404 which would seem harsh to penalize me for.The only other pages that I can think of are some dynamic pages that the store uses to create reviews such as:www.aluminumeyewear.com/product-reviews-add.aspx?product=2www.aluminumeyewear.com/resize.aspxI'm pretty sure that the reviews page is blocked via robots txt. The resize.aspx is a blank page with javascript as its needed by the PowerReviews Express system to work, and many many merchants use that platform so it would be hard to think its that.Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smckenzie750 -
I am not a SEO expert , need a gentleman to help me
I have been hit by Latest google update . dont have enough money to pay seo consultants , just wondering if anyone expert can off a free analysis of my site and can point problems. Its not a adsence site . My living depends on this site so cant just keep on doing experiments , by the looks I have been hit hard by negative seo by competitor . I give url in private . Is there any one kind here who can help in private . Would really appreciate .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HateDoingSEO0 -
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!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1