Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
I am trying to generate GEO meta tag for my website where on one page there are multiple locations My question is, Can I add GEO tagging for every address?
Am I restricted to 1 geo tag per page or can i add multiple geo tags ?
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.
Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Why am I not showing up in the SERP's or Google Local?
I have been trying to optimise the following site for both Google SERP's and Google Local - Pixel Primate The URL has been around for around 3 years now but they just updated the website and launched it in December 2012. I did the on-page optimisation early in January 2013 and Google seems to have indexed the changes, for the home page at least. One major keyword I am targeting for the home page is 'Web Design Leicester'. I understand that the DA is fairly low (24) so this is something I need to improve. However, I've experienced positive results fairly quickly from just on-page optimisation for other sites I have worked on. The site just doesn't seem to be ranking at all for any keywords. Maybe the industry type is just extremely competitve but I find it very strange to not be visible anywhere in the SERPs. The site does not seem to have any penalties as it ranks for 'Pixel Primate' and all pages appear when doing a site: search. Also what's strange is that I set up the Google Local listing years ago but it doesn't appear anywhere in the local listing, not even when I search for it manually. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Alt and Title Attributes in Anchor Tags
Does it hurt to use alt and title attributes inside an anchor tag? Example: view my website article
Technical SEO | | donationtown0