Competitor Recently Changed his Title to Match Mine
-
Hey Mozsters,
I'm competing with one website for a niche, he's currently beating me and recently changed his Title to match mine exactly. Are there any negative repercussions from this? Should I change mine so users aren't confused?
Why would someone do this?
-
Cheers
-
Yes, your meta description should focus 100% on getting the users to click on your result, because it convinces them it's what they're searching for.
Google doesn't use meta description as a ranking factor, so there's no worry there. Just make sure to stay within the allotted character amount of around 156.
-
Can you elaborate on the meta description? Do you think I should make it more enticing for people searching?
-
Did they change a title of a single web page?
Or
Did they dedicate a whole website to the title of a product?
Some niche markets are very narrow and you WILL have matching phrases and titles and even products, if you run into that you just have to stay ahead of the curve and keep your site above theirs.
Also if you are selling a product, service, then make sure your website is dedicated to getting a better conversion for your clients.
People copy for lots of reasons:
1. They have the same idea and geographical region, or the same name.
2. They want to get an edge on a competitor.
3. They want to get hits on the keywords maybe for a different reason,
(http://moz.com/blog/barnacle-seo-whiteboard-friday)
If you're dedicated to your niche market, then keep the name and keep your site/media/web presence above theirs.
-
Do you use your brand in your title? Is copying your brand too? If so, he's shooting himself in the foot. If not, there isn't much you can do to address the title specifically, but there are some other things you can do to make your result more desirable to click. .
Don't change your title if you believe it's the best title for your business. If you aren't using your brand in the title, this could help users with confusion. Also, if he's copying your title, make sure to beat him out in the meta description to siphon off more click-throughs. Also look into the kinds of rich snippets you might be able to put in there to make your result stand out while you work on over taking him.
This title won't have negative repercussions for you from an SEO standpoint. I usually just smile when I see something like this happen. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.
-
If their title matches your title it's for seo purposes, i think. Be sure to have your brand name on your title to have any difference.
Your competitor also can change newly the title to have the brand name, but because they doesn't have this on the page url, probably that's be bad for him.
But i cannot see anymore... I think the title it's important, but, it's more important the content. Check your competitor content for if it's stealing your own. And be sure google has cached your content already, for mark their one as duplicate.
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
-
Wrong title tag
Hi, need help. I notice Google always , on all my pages (about 30), index wrong title tag. If I try to use "my-keywords-here | my_company_name" Google always index "my_company_name: my-keywords-here" and can't figure why is that :(
Technical SEO | | MirkoL
The problem is always only with "my-keywords-here | my_company_name".
If I use "my-keywords-here - my_company_name" or "my-keywords-here my_company_name" (without sign | ) everything is fine
Is anybody having any reasonable explanation?
Is anybody having Joomla page with "my-keywords-here | my_company_name" in the title and have indexed by Google like that? one example is www.ferometal-prerada.hr Thank you1 -
Duplicate Title Tags How harmful is it?
I recently updated a site to use a new WordPress theme. This theme in conjunction with Yoast SEO plugin is causing duplicate Title tags. The tags have the same title in them. I discovered this when adding new keywords and pages to the page optimizer in moz. I have since turned off moz to stop the duplicate title tag issue however I am wondering if tuning off yoast is worse then the duplicate title tags. Any clarification on the duplicate page title issue and its consequences would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
URL Change, Old URLs Still In Index
Recently changed URLs on a website to remove dynamic parameters. We 301'd the old dynamic links (canonical version) to the cleaner parameter-free URLs. We then updated the canonical tags to reflect these changes. All pages dropped at least a few ranking positions and now Moz shows both the new page ranking slightly lower in results pages and the old page still in the index. I feel like I'm splitting value between the two page versions until the old one disappears... is there a way to consolidate this quickly?
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Changing URLs
As of right now we are using yahoo small business, when creating a product you have to declare an id, when we created the site we were not aware that you will not be able to change the id but also the ID is being used as the URL. we have a couple thousand products in which we will need to update the URLs. What would the best way to be to fix this without losing much juice from our current pages. Also I was thinking that if we did them all in a couple weeks it would hurt us a lot, and the best course of action would be to do a slow roll out of the URL changes. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and %3E, how can I avoid this?
In my crawl report I keep seeing duplicate page title warning with URL's being referenced twice: e.g. /company/ceo-message/ /company/ceo-message/%3E I'm using canonical link tags but after the new crawl report, I'm still seeing this duplicate page title crawl error. How can I avoid this? I've been looking for answers for a few days but don't seem to see this exact problem discussed. Any insight is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mxmo0 -
Optimum title and description meta tag length
Hi all, I have read that a title tag and description tag length of 69 and 156 characters respectively, should be used as this is all that Google will show in the search results, but that search engine robots will read longer titles and descriptions and additional characters will have an effect on ranking algorithms. However, is there any SEO benefit in making title and description tags longer to include more keywords to aid ranking, even though the latter part won't be visible in the results. I have read elsewhere on this forum that there may be concerns with regards to keyword dilution, but what about keyword reinforcement, i.e. by a repetition of the main keyword at the end of the title/description (I mean in a readable manner here, not 'stuffed')? Thanks in advance, Gareth
Technical SEO | | gdavies090319770 -
How to proceed with domain switch AND url change
Hi, in a few weeks we'll do a major change on our website. This involves over 1.5 million pages indexed in Google driving substantial amount of our traffic. Basically we have 2 types of changes: subdomain switches to domain:
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
ex. product.company.com will become www.product.com
for this we know how to manage DNS and Apache rules different url patterns, basically replacing ugly urls by pretty urls
for this we have advanced 301-mapping rules set up Here is the question - what is best way to proceed with these 2 changes in order to preserve rankings and organic traffic: Do both changes simultaneously? First do url changes, than the domain switch Can you please share your thoughts?0