Fixed horrible title tag on home page, and lost ranking. Will it come back?
-
I was helping out someone on their site and its home page ranked on page 2 for their term, and the title tag was horrible. It was 160 characters long with lots of near repetitive keywords ([keyword] - adjective [keyword] - adjective [keyword] - adjective [keyword] etc.) -- typical title that Google would penalize when it got around to it.
So I created a title that made sense, for the keyword, and that followed the best practices of Google recommendations. Now it's dropped off the index. (EDIT: sorry, still in index, just not even in top 1000)
Is this something I should not have done? I was just trying to keep them from getting slammed.
And, how long should I expect it to take to get my ranking back?
This is the only page title I changed.
-
Interesting that in DuckDuckGo.com and StartPage.com it is showing with the new title wording, and in increased position (#3 on DuckDuckGo.com). Still not up there in google.
Any idea if this means anything?
-
"it would not drop off the index"
My apologies, I did say that but I meant it dropped off the rankings, not even in top 1000 now) I edited my question now to be more accurate.
-
I'd have to agree that doing what you have done should not have impacted the rankings so dramatically. I have seen minor fluctuations when modifying title tags but not to this extent. I would give it a few days to see if things settle down. If you stil see the same problems after a few days then I would suggest that something else is likely the cause of the dramatic drop in rankings.
-
Based on what you answered:
I would ask the site owner about question one. He should have a firm idea of other ranking drops or possible penalties. What other sites are doing is also a factor, but I don't see how a page would drop off the index due to title tag modification.
I have seen pages move up and down by tweaking the title tag. In my experience, when you make the title tag cleaner and less repetitive, the page ranks better. Even if it were to move down, it would not drop off the index. That seems bizarre!
But, I am speculating without knowing the site or keyword the page is ranking for.
-
- Has the site lost rankings for other pages?
I don't think so.
- Has anything else been done that might have an impact on rankings (i.e adding links, removing links)?
Nothing else has been changed.
- When you paste the URL in Google, does it come up as the first search result? If so, it was not dropped from the index.
Yes.
- Is the keywords still at the beginning of the title tag?
Yes.
- Is there another page on the site that now ranks for the site? You may have more than one page on the site targeting the same keyword.
No
-
Changing the title tag is not something that would cause that page to drop off the index. A fewof questions:
-
Has the site lost rankings for other pages?
-
Has anything else been done that might have an impact on rankings (i.e adding links, removing links)?
-
When you paste the URL in Google, does it come up as the first search result? If so, it was not dropped from the index.
-
Is the keywords still at the beginning of the title tag?
-
Is there another page on the site that now ranks for the site? You may have more than one page on the site targeting the same keyword.
-
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
-
Missing canonical tag error - office pages
Moz is throwing an error for our office pages (10 office pages in the format /office/location-1; /office/location-2 etc) but the content is different. How should we handle the canonical tag? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | AztekMedia0 -
Page Rank Lost After Website Transfer
Hello, I recently transferred a website from Ruby on Rails to Wordpress in order to help with the site's responsiveness. I kept all of the URLs the exact same, but when I transferred it only the homepage and one other page kept their page ranks, all of the others have lost theirs completely. Almost every page on the site was at least a PR 2, and now their not ranked, and not ranking in the top of search engines like they were before. I am not quite sure what might have caused this, like I said, I kept the URLs all the exact same and its strange that 2 pages were not effected. I crawled the site with Screaming From and all of the pages that lost their page rank have a status as "Moved Permanently". They are the exact same URL, but they are listed without www. in front, could this have something to do with it? The website is www.goenergylink.com, and you will see that the homepage and "Residential" page still have their page rank, but none of the others do. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | mcmckenna10 -
New Pages - Stable Rankings
Hello, Not a direct question really, just a poll really of your experience - I work with a few companies and have noticed recently that there seems to be an increase in the time it takes to go from a) showing up in the index (quickly within a day or two) to b) getting a stable ranking. I see spikes over the first few weeks (even up to 3 months) before the rankings eventually settle. Have you noticed the same, is it taking longer to achieve a stable ranking, do you work with any sites that get indexed, rank, and stay in the same slot for moderately competitive terms comparing to a year or tow ago? Interested to hear other people's experience and how long we expect to wait for new content to settle Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | xoffie0 -
Looking for advice on rewriting page that is currently ranked.
Hi, we put up a page 2 years ago (available from our home page) that is currently ranking in top 5 for a few of the key words we built it for. The challenge is we did this quickly and know we can (and actually have) built out a better quality, informative page. The content while similar is completely rewritten. Does anyone have experience in rewriting low quality pages that are ranking well? Essentially we are trying to step up our game and build up our quality from a human perspective, but unsure what/if any would happen with our SEO and keywords we are currently ranking for. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | redfishking0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
Home Page Content - In a Div?
Is putting content in a div so it doesn't muck up the look of the home page create a problem in doing well organically? Example - http://www.callawaygardens.com. We have lots of clients that want no text on the home page and we are trying to figure out how to do this while still ranking well organically. What are your thoughts? Can we get in trouble? Are there negative impacts with SEO doing it like this? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStream80 -
DUPLICATE PAGE TITLE ISSUE
Hi We have 25 pages with a download form on it. People arrive at the page through a ink with optimised anchor text which sits on the information pages. As there is no information on these pages we do not need them to be optimised so the developer has given all the download pages exactly the same page title. Although the pages in themselves are not significant would this effect the way Google viewed the whole site, and would it pay to make each one unique or doesn't it really matter. Alternatively, is there a better way to handle this? and if so would that ligate the benefit of the anchor text. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920 -
Optimization of home page
Hi there I have an issue which, despite searching hard, I simply cannot find the right solution for. We have an index page that used to rank pretty well for a main industry keyword. However following a revamp of the site last year the kw slipped and no longer brings in decent traffic levels. The problem seems to be that the old static site had a sprinkling of variable anchor text links that brought value to the home page. Instead of the main anchor being "home" we would revert to "main keyword" and variations across the site sometimes in t he content but mainly on the nav bars. However the new CMS design structure restricts us considerably with anchor distribution and so instead we opted for the site logo on the masthead to have an ALT tag for "main keyword" but so as not to game google too much we added .."home" to the tag. Probably pointless but we figured it could do no harm. This ALT text is site wide Problem now is that we have lost the spread of internal nav bar anchors and variety etc. We have slipped in the serps for "main keyword" and I cant help thinking we are not maximising the anchors as we should. So what Im coming to is this.... How can we tell if Google is picking up the ALT tage anchor as the main anchor to rank the site at the expense of all internal text anchors. Despite retaining lots of embedded anchors - according to the Moz metrics these are not being picked up because OSE suggests the ALT tag anchor is taking precedence. The serps probably support this view as well. Should we: a) Vary the masthead ALT if there is no way of avoiding this being the most important link / anchor on the page b) Remove the ALT anchor and instead opt for content links high on the page (we do have nav bar links saying "Home" site wide as well which may overrid the embedded links?) c) Leave the ALT alone and still push for content anchors as described in b) What is the best way to handle this..? Best wishes and thanks Morch
On-Page Optimization | | Morch0