Am I cannabalizing my title tags or is there a better way?
-
I've read some info about title tags and meta, and I'm getting a little confused. If there is a previous discussion that I've missed, please redirect me. thank you.
So I have a locksmith and one of his pages is on Auto Locksmith.
For every car, I have a page. i.e Acura, Audi, BMW etc.
Here is my title tag:
- Acura Car Keys| Ignition Switch Repair| Key Duplication
- BMW Car Keys| Ignition Switch Repair| Key Duplication
- Same for the rest of the different car models on the site.
I previously asked a question on here about "What is Cannibalization", and after reading the answer, as well as a full article about it, I think I may be potentially cannibalizing my site with these title tags, though my SEO Moz has not indicated that I am.
Should my title tags be instead...
Acura car keys| Acura Ignition Switch Repair| Acura Key Duplication for each vehicle page?
Additionally, all the Meta Descriptions on each vehicle page read the same as well. Is this correct?
We duplicate Acura car keys, repair ignition switches, extract broken keys, replace remotes, reprogram transponder keys and provide emergency locksmith srvc.
Lastly, this is for a city, yet I have not placed the city modifier in my tags nor content. Somehow it knows what city I'm in because some of my pages are ranking on Page 1, however other pages are ranking like #188, #257...So I'm just confused.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Jaye
-
Thanks Mark!! That helps a lot!!
At least I'm on my way to better optimization.
-
Jay-
Title tags need to be concise but need to do a good job of defining what the page is about. The best title tag in your example is:
Acura car keys | Acura Ignition Switch Repair | Acura Key Duplication Make sure there is a pace after the last word in each kewyrod.
To localize and geo-target the same listing you could use Dallas acura car keys / dallas acura ignition switch repis.....or Acura car keys in dallas / Acura ignition switch in Dallas........
Localizing and geo-targeting the title makes sense and will help you in local results.
The meta tage description should be more huiman readbale and should add some additional detail. make sure mutliple pages are not the same exact meta descritpion with the exception of the car type. Mix them up in content but make them applicable to the subject.
For example: "We are the best locksmith in Dallas. We provide Car keys, Ignition switch repair and key duplication for all acura makes and models in the dallas area."
This is Googles webmaster tools description of what you should do with the meta tag:
The description attribute within the tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.
The url is http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
Dont worry about cannibalizing if you follow these rules.You will be in good shape.
Good luck.
Mark
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
-
Implementing nofollow tag affect ranking
if a blog that is performing well on the first page at an average position of 4 for an informative term. The blog contains a lot of outbound links, adding nofollow tag to all of them affect the current ranking? There are few other same cases. Here is the link - monk.webengage.com The was a lot of other optimization done on the page but the ranking did not improve at all. Is the issue with my domain authority or is it due to higher backlink to other competitive domains.
On-Page Optimization | | Web-Engage0 -
H1 tag mandatory?
Hi there! Is a mandatory to fullfill the H1 tag in order to improve SEO? I mean I'm in the case where the keyword selected is appropiate to optimize the page but not appropiate to be in H1 tag 'cause it probably "doesn't sound good" to the user. Is it enought to be present in the url, title and description?Any suggestion? Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Duplicate content in the title
Good morning, I am developing an application that searches offers in the press. The problem I have is the follow one:
On-Page Optimization | | ofuente
When I find an offer that I have already post, I cant use the same URL because it generates duplicate content , as the URL is generated from the title. If I find two offers in different stores (for example Thomson TV) I am studying two options. The first would be to add a number at the end of the URL
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson1
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson2 Another option I propose would be to add semantic data to provide value (such as the date). For example:
http://www.offertazo.com/01-12-12/televisor-thomson I appreciate your help.0 -
How dangerous are duplicate page titles
We ran a SEO crawl and on our report it flag up duplicate pages titles, we investigate further and found that these were page titles from the same product line that had more than one page, e.g 1-50 (products) 51-100 (products) with a next button to move to the following 50 products. These where flagged as duplicate page titles ".../range-1/page-1" and ".../range-1/page-2" These titles are obviously being read as duplicates but because they are the same range we do not know what the best course of action is. We want to know how detrimental these page titles will be to our SEO if at all. If anyone could shed some light on this issue it would be a massive help. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SimonDixon0 -
Is it damaging to have TOO long a title tag these days? i.e. well over character limit
Is it damaging to have TOO long a title tag these days? i.e. well over character limit. I learned that title tags should be around 70 characters. I am new at this, but have a client that has three times that, with the same three keyword phrases repeating 3-4 times. And then NO h1's or h2's in the text......advice? Rookie here 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | cschwartzel0 -
SERPs Showing H1s Instead of Title Tags?
Hi, I'm noticing two strange things in search results recently. Often I find that if I search for a client's company name, I see just the company name in SERPs where the title tag would normally be displayed. Examples: 'aci northwest' 'lanz heating' As strange as that is, I'm tempted to assume this is just Google's way of "getting smarter" and showing more relevant results (though I'm not sure exactly where it's pulling from). But it gets stranger. For the first example, 'aci northwest', when search that key phrase on Bing/Yahoo!, etc. I'm not only not seeing the title tag where it would normally be, but I'm seeing the H1 in it's place: "When your projects demand more, demand ACI." Any idea what's happening here? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Page title structure?
From an SEO and user perspective what structure do you recommend for page titles. For example (given that they shouldn't ideally be more than 70 characters) :- Keywords (maybe two or three) | Company Name | more keywords I understood the best place for the company name was about second place. Is this now the considered view taking into consideration 'branding' which has been flagged up as the way forward. Keywords are separated by the vertical bar | - any thoughts? For 'house keeping' pages such as Privacy Policy - should this be optmised or simply stated as 'privacy policy' Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920 -
A good title for each page on my website.
Dear SEOs, I know these facts: a) not more than 70 chars b) relevant to the page subject - probably best keyword at the beginning My problem - should I rebuild the current structure of my titles which is: Main Page keywords (in my case 4) | domain name - Main Page Sub-page - one click from main page keywords (again same 4) | domain name - Sub Page Name (or as you like Category Name) Specific page with an article / content keywords (again same 4 as on any other) | domain name - category name - title of article same as used in tag To be more precise, should this title be changed for following pages: Sub Page - where really it's page that let's you chose particular subjects (there will be few article for each subjects) so should the keywords be changed to - "chose your category" Specific page with an article - should the category name - title of article be completely removed and first part of title which at the moment contains same 4 keywords used on main page be replaced with keywords specific for the content ? To be honest I find those titles at the moment bit confusing and sort of illogical. But since I can't really change anything in the code I would like to know what's the right way before I keep pressing on the programmer 🙂 Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz0