Title tag solution for a med sized site

[MikeCoughlin]

Its the same old story, we all know it well.  I have a client that has a site with 20k+ pages (not too big) and traffic levels around 450k/month.

Now we have identified 15 pages with various conversion points/great backlink metrics etc. that we are going to explicitly target in the first round of recs.  However, we are looking at about 18,000 dup title tags that I'd like to clean up.

The site is not on a CMS and in the past I've had the dev team write a script to adopt the h1 tag or the name of the page etc as the title tag.  This can cause a problem when some of these pages that are being found in long tail search lose their positions etc.  I'm more hesitant than ever to make this move with this current client because they get a ton of long tail traffic spread over a ton of original content they wrote.

How does everyone else usually handle this?  Thoughts?

Thanks in advance Mozzers!

[akaigotchi]

How about having your developers script something, that scrapes all 18.000 h1, h2, h3 for each article and store them in a database. Finding dupes then would be a piece of cake, even for a less experienced developer You could easily export all your duplicates to csv and then manually rename them based on their content.

Dev time: about 1 day max. (Developed a lot of software myself and IMHO a good developer should get this up and running within 4 hours)

If you don't have toooooo many duplicate tags, correcting those in question shouldn't be taking too long aswell.

If you have done your chores you could reimport your corrected title-tags to the database. Your developer could write a script in the meantime, that sets the title-tag of a page according to the title-tag you stated in your database.

Hope that helped If you have further questions on this, just go ahead. Had a similar problem with 25k+ pages for a major health insurance and we figured out, that the best way to prevent problems was to do most of the work manually than with a script. Helped us a lot to stay within the budget and given timeframe.

[Oversteer]

This is sound advice. Test out a percentage of pages before rolling out the change site-wide.

I also agree that 18K duplicate titles isn't helping the site.

One thing I would do is review analytics and define the top X % pages and hand optimize those. The balance can be optimized via rules utilizing the system you outlined. As to whether to use the H1 or the file name or some other element, I'd probably lean towards the h1 as it would likely accurately describe the content and not be truncated or contain stop words.

[firstconversion]

i normally use {H1 assuming its unique} | Section | Brand.com

or if ist too long or the sections dont add menaingful context

{H1 assuming its unique} | Brand.com

If you are incredibly well know and trusted site in a spammy community then go with Brand.com | {H1 assuming its unique}

[firstconversion]

Can you implement on a section or on a % of your pages first? then you can test the effect without risking your whole catalogue

[blu42media]

Ryan - excellent points!  The benefits of adding a CMS to this site would be quite good, at the very least for providing some sort of grounds for moving forward on a unified platform.

[MikeCoughlin]

The 18k is a hard piece of the puzzle to wrap your mind around...I'd like to give more details there but can't...currently.  Hopefully when this campaign starts to show results they will let me write a case for it...I'll be sure to share.

There is a "templating system" for various sections.  However, as I mentioned,  many developers have had their hands in it and didn't follow a standardized system.

I am considering EGOLs comment

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

Is there any form of standardization? I can't imagine 18k pages which were independently developed.

There should be a templating system or some logic which controls code common to all pages. Most pages should share the same header, footer and sidebar, along with standards for things like a canonicalization tag, title and meta description.

If that is not the case, the EGOL's comment should be considered. It is not reasonable to maintain a site which lacks standards.

[EGOL]

It's possible that putting a reasonably intelligent human on the job for a couple of months could pay back big time.  I'll bet a good title tag job would pull in thousands of dollars worth of sales every month.

[MikeCoughlin]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for the response!

There was 18k title tag duplicates but top content that I can tell is being found in search is about 1,500 pages.  Its not a forum site or a site with UGC.  Its a very successful tech hardware company that has put out a lot of great unique content over time.

Determining the logic is the tough part because there isn't a lot of consistency throughout the site...different developers have had their hands in it over time.

[RyanKent]

What kind of site is it?

With 18k+ pages I will take a guess that it is a forum site. Definitely check with your forum software provider. There should be some form of "page container" which is used as a template for all the site's pages. If you can determine the logic you want to use, such as go with the post title or H1 tag, then you can modify the template according to your logic and take care of your entire site quickly and easily.

[MikeCoughlin]

Thanks for the response!  I should rephrase my question...

I'm either looking for tricks/tips others use in this situation or messages like yours that will give me the confidence to go for it haha.

I think we've all experienced the fear of doing what we know is technically correct and risk being at the mercy of the algo.  I've gone this route a lot in the past but I've never done it on a site that gets traffic so deep into so many pages from search.

Have you ever gone the script route?  If so, what did you have it pull to use as a title tag?  Like I mentioned above, I usually have used h1's in the past..

[EGOL]

If a lot of traffic is coming in through 18,000 pages that have duplicate title tags I am willing to bet that there will be a huge increase in the amount of traffic that those pages pull when unique and relevant title tags are put in place.

So, although there is a small chance that traffic will go down, I think that there is a much higher chance that traffic will immedately shoot up spectacularly - and the quality of that traffic might also improve.

I would archive the site, run a script to replace the title tags, see what happens.  You can always put the old title tags back up if this doesn't work - but I bet it works great.