Thoughts on Results from Changing Title Tags
-
A number of the client's we represent have seen drops in rankings. The title tags on these sites are formatted old way of doing tilte: "Blue Widgets| Cheap Widgets | Metal Widgets".
We are going to change them to the natural format: Acme Offers Blue, Metal Widgets for Any Budget."
Just wondering if anyone has made similar changes post-penguin and if they've seen improved ranking from doing it.
-
Sometimes not being consistent helps. Just my 2c. I would look at if there were other reasons. Are your off-page factors pretty well competitive. Did you get a unnatural links warning ? If after all those answers, you still think it's the page titles, change them on a handful of pages and see if you see any movement at all in the SERPS before investing a lot of time, effort and resources in this.
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
-
Downsides on shortening article title?
Hi there, I'm new to Moz: great tool so far! I just tried the page optimization feature and see that (for instance for this article) page titles are often too long. Now it's tempting to just shorten the title straight away, but I have a memory of someone once telling me changing the title will change the URL. And changing the URL is something not appreciated by Google. Could someone please explain if and why this is/isn't the case? And if there are any downsides/things to consider before changing the article's title? Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RaoulWB1 -
SEO results/title tags/desktop vs. mobile
I am trying to figure out why my title tags comes up different between desktop and mobile search results. Desktop returns my title tag as written, but on mobile I get something completely different. It's related to the site, but not anything I can read, as coded in the site (i.e. not the title tags, meta, or anywhere else). Has anyone else experienced this? My title tag is 64 characters - I know it's a little bit over, but would that cause such a weird issue as a completely different title in the search results?
On-Page Optimization | | tallyhodesign0 -
Alt and title tags on images
For SEO, are alt and title tags still worth the effort? Or have they gone the way of meta keywords? I can see having alt tags for visually impaired reasons, but at this point is there any SEO reason to use them?
On-Page Optimization | | CompucastWeb0 -
What are the benefits of the URL meta tag?
We have too many meta tags and want to get rid of all the outdated ones. However, we don't want to eliminate valuable meta tags by mistake. So, before we say goodbye to the URL meta tag, we want to make sure we understand the pros and cons, if any. By the way, we are not referring to canonical URL tags, just URL as in:
On-Page Optimization | | GRIP-SEO0 -
Tag-URLs in Magento
Hello, I have got a problem concerning Tag-URLs in Magento (the URLs mentioned are just fictitious 😞 At the moment, they look something like this: (1) http://store.com/tag/product/list/tagId/1/ ... so these URLs are not search engine friendly at all. Using a Magento extension you could transform them in speaking URLs: (2) http://store.com/tag/digital-cameras What would you do if you sold, say, digital cameras and your online shop ranked high for the keyword "digital camera" with URL No. 1 (not search engine friendly). Would you transform (1) in (2) and 301 all non speaking URLs? But would you keep the high ranking for "digital camera" when 301 to URL No. (2). But, what I'm most concerned of is : There is actually a landing page (category page) for the keyword "digital camera" : http://store.com/digital-cameras. Shouldn't the last URL rank high for "digital camera"? (instead of the tag URLs). But given the situation above, does it make sense now to 301 the tag URL to the category page? I would perhaps lose my good ranking, wouldn't I? Thanks a lot for your help! Martin
On-Page Optimization | | SmartyMarty810 -
Canonical tag help
Hi, We have a product which is marketed by affiliates . Affiliates send referrals to our sale page by adding their affiliate IDs to our product page like http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref= 12345. We want to avoid the content duplication impression to Google by using canonical tags but we are not clear about its use. Should we use it on http://www.mysite.com/products.php ( actual page) or we should create temporary pages for each referral id i.e http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref= 12345 and then add canonical tags to all those pages linking to proper page i.e http://www.mysite.com/products.php ? Thanks, shaz
On-Page Optimization | | shaz_lhr0 -
Title Tag, Are the Keywords Plucked out of it?
We are working on redoing our site and I read the article from rand about how to properly format title tags, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page He showed how he could take 6 keywords and use them all in the title tag: The title Tag:
On-Page Optimization | | donford
Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org The keywords:
Ted Baker
Ted Baker London
Ted Baker Clothing
Ted Baker Mens
Ted Baker Mens Clothing
Ted Baker Mens Collection So what I am wondering is the keyword Ted Baker Mens Collection actually getting found. In this case we are dealing with a contraction (men's) and a plural form of a keyword (collections). Is it plucked out from the title tag above?
Like this? Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org In his article he goes on to say the biggest mistake he sees is, unfortunately exactly the way our site was built 6 years ago. That is people doing this: Ted Baker, Ted Baker London, Ted Baker Clothing, Ted Baker Men's Clothing, Ted Baker Clothing Collection - Buy Online Now at Manamialameseo.com Our site does just that, while we are PR 4 and get decent traffic for the business we are in, we are doing a huge update with new pages, information, and most importantly trying to get all the SEO the best as possible. I want to make sure before we make these what could be huge impact changes that search engines do in fact Pluck the keywords from the title tag, and they are not required to be together. Thank you for any thoughts, answers and most importantly your time. Example following this formula: Our Top 3 Keywords:
Molded Rubber
Rubber Molding
Custom Molded Rubber Our Old way:
Title: Custom Molded Rubber, Rubber Molding, Molded Rubber
The new way:
Title: Custom Molded Rubber - Molding Services | OurSite.com0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0