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.
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
-
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below.
This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase?Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m
<colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month |<colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month |<colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month |<colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month |<colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York | -
Hi Kingalan
I did offer to help after you emailed me. I emailed back but didn't hear anything back from you.
Regards
Nigel
-
- PLP > Product Listing Pages
- Search Console > Is the name for the old Webmaster Tools if you don't have it is a good idea to install it on your website
How do I decide where to create the internal links between the pages?
First, you need to determinate your site structure to decide how to make your internal linksGoogle Search Console
-
Hi Roman:
Sorry but 2 more questions:
Not sure what you mean by the below:
"I strongly suggest to optimize your PLP pages they are like the categories in your website, so they are very close to your home page and should be at the top of your content structure."Also, regarding:
Lack of “Speaking” URLs
Is it more acceptable to rewrite the URLs of listing pages with very little page authority. I assume the redirect will make no difference if a listing has a page authority of 1-5.
If the new listing page is improves, the authority should improve.
We have about 350 pages. Do you think a good approach might be to start off trying to improve 30-40 pages to see if we are on the right track?
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Roman:
Thanks for this most detailed, terrific response!!
A few questions:
1. What does "PLP" stand for? (I'm an amateur, sorry)
2. What is search console?
3. How do I decided where to create the internal links between the pages?REGARDING:
Optimal format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name 8-foot Green Widgets - Widgets & Tools | Widget World The above is a good example. Your suggestion to remove brand name is interesting. It provides a lot more space (characters). Good idea as long as removing brand from title is not detrimental.But using the above "widgets" nexample what would we substitute "Brand Name" with?
What happens of some of the keywords get redundant? Like the neighborhood may be an important keyword
New York Office Space Rental / Chelsea Loft Space/ XXXXXXWe might have about 75 loft spaces, wouldn't this redundancy be bad?
Also, many, many searches use:
Manhattan office space
NYC Office space
New York City office spaceAnd many permutations. The competition for these terms in Manhattan in insane!!! Google Adwords has many of these terms listed for $35+.
Do you think it best to have geographic keywords in schemas, title tags, descriptions or URLs?
Many of our URLS are poorly written. Do you think it best to re-write them or will the redirect reduce ranking?
Thanks again,
Alan -
1 - Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
I strongly suggest to optimize your PLP pages they are like the categories in your website, so they are very close to your home page and should be at the top of your content structure.
So what you can do it about
- Optimize the titles and description tag
- Add schemas to those PLP
- Then markup those pages using Search Console
- Create some internal links to those pages
This are some tips from the SEO Learning Center
https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tagOptimal format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
8-foot Green Widgets - Widgets & Tools | Widget WorldThere are a few basic strategies that realtor can utilize to increase PLP SEO scores, site visibility, and conversions.
- Increase the number of relevant keywords included on PLP pages by adding plain text descriptions and related keywords.
- Embed keywords within the URLs of PLP pages
- Raise SEO authority by decreasing bounce rate
7 Critical SEO Errors you should avoid
- Lack of Properties Description
- Lack of Properties Reviews
- Not Optimizing Properties Pages Based on The Search Demand
- Non-Unique Titles
- Lack of “Speaking” URLs
- A Lot of Duplicate Content
The Golden Rule of SEO – Make Usability a Priority
As you know, Google is a search engine that is very worried about its users and their experience. First of all, you should make your online store convenient and useful for customers in order to achieve its respect. What is good and unique to your clients – it’s good for Google.The more time people spend on your site, and less they click back to the search results page is a great indication that Google is sending them to the right place.
Finally, people who like your website and what it has to offer are much more likely to link to it – and as we said before, links are what drive you to top the search results page!
2 - If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
I don't have experience in Real Estate and don't live in NY.
But the first thing that comes to my mind is, did you study your main competitors?
Which are your top 10 competitors? most important
What are they doing?Base on my experience and looking some of your competitors the best solution is to use Price Ranges
3 - Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
There is no absolute answer to your question, because all depends on how your users make their research
So you need to make your own research, Moz and Ahrefs have the best keywords management tools in my opinion
with Moz Pro, you can create some keyword list and see the metricsGo to your Moz account > Keyword Explorer > Create or upload new list
these are the question that you need to answer
Which keywords use your audience/users?
What is the volume of searches using New York, NY?
What is the volume of searches using Manhattan, NY?
What is difficulty level for those keywords?When you answer those question you will have the answer that you are looking for
4 - Talking about your branding
In my opinion, you need to forget your brand and focus on your target audience
Google does not need your brand keyword in title to know who or your company areyou can use Shemas on your site with all your brand information
Schemas for Brands
http://schema.org/BrandSchemas for RealEstate Agent
http://schema.org/RealEstateAgentHere is shema generator for Real Estate Agency to make your life easier
http://microdatagenerator.com/realEstateAgency.html
Sources
Optimizing SEO for E-commerce Product Listing Pages
7 Critical SEO Errors of E-commerce Websites
9 Actionable Real Estate SEO Hacks for Real Estate Agents Looking To Get More Leads
Real Estate SEO for Beginners – Everything You Need To Start TodayIF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
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
-
Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ1 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers0