Difference in using dividers in TITLE TAG
-
Hi everyone, i know that dividers in title or even title tag doesnt have much of an impact on better rankings. I had great rankings for many keywords, not using dividers or using only one divider. However for better reading comprehension and usability, and also aesthetics i started to use the pipe as my main divider and other secondary dividers. I saw many pages drop in rankings vs other less competent and with less content pages. My format was as follows:
Product Brand | Product description - Additional info or local info
ie. Fiber Glass MBI | Insulation Batts for Home and Commercial use - Acoustic and Thermal Insulation
I changed the format for a handful of pages, and saw immediate results on rankings and traffic on those pages.
Product Brand with Product Description - Additional Info
ie. Fiber Glass MBI Insulation Batts for Commercial use - Acoustic and Thermal Insulation.
Does it sound like something i should implement page wide. I personally like the aesthetics of the pipe as it gives a cleaner look, but the better rankings on the changed pages with using only one divider makes me think. Does it sound familiar, or its just a coincidence,
Regards,
-
Thanks for the response and follow up. I will dig deeper as to why the better rankings and incoming traffic recently.
Regards,
-
I would say more links and new/refreshed content would definitely have more to do with it than the presence or absence of a pipe.
With a pipe the title will be slightly longer. The example titles you gave seem on the long side, but nothing longer than most in that industry.
-
As i am responsible for the page changes, i didnt do much really. Just some minor tweaks in the description page, some new content, my incoming links have been increasing slightly. But i see better results with the pages with titles with no dividers.
Maybe its a coincidence, i just thought maybe something was going on with the dividers. But it doesnt seem that way. Is there anything else i might be missing as why these pages rank better than other similar pages?
Great star trek example haha, thanks!
-
Negative, its a network solutions hosted page. With regular code.
-
I also changed the meta description tag in these pages. I did some general content maintenance, such as review the outgoing links, add some images, but nothing else.
My incoming links have been increasing since July, but ive seen better results with the pages with Title Tags with no dividers or only one divider. I need to dig deeper, as i researched that the title tag alone doesnt make much of a difference.
-
The problem with figuring out the benefit of these minute changes is that there are thousands of other changes that have occurred. Many of them are out of our control. So while you were experimenting with separators, another webmaster might have made a change that made a competing page or pages decrease. And that's just one example.
It would make for an interesting outlying case if your site/pages were positioned just so that one weird, seemingly innocuous, tweak made the difference.
If you've seen the first film in the Star Trek reboot, you might remember how Scotty figured out his transporter problem. Well, actually Future Spock just gave it to him - since Future Scotty was going to fix the problem anyway. But upon looking at the calculations, Scotty realized that space itself was also moving. Which was why his previous experiments were a disaster.
What I'm saying is, aside from 'I'm a dork', is nothing exists in a vacuum. It's very hard to determine if a tiny change had a positive benefit. There are so many external factors/moving parts. Though it would help reduce uncertainty if you didn't change anything else.
-
Was this a Wordpress blog and did you install a plugin to do these changes ?
-
Jesus,
Did you change anything else besides just inserting the pipes?
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
-
Q&A Page Titles
Hello All! I am currently updating page titles and metadata descriptions for a websites Q&A section and have run in to a problem while updating page titles. Since it is the Q&A section of the website, all of the page titles are around 100 characters and some are up to 200 characters long. Here is an example: Page Title: My child is working below grade level in math. Do I have to purchase the curriculum from the grade below as well? The problem is that this is obviously too long for a SERP to display however I know it is best practice to have matching titles on both the title tag and page title. My question is what hurts SEO value more: the title tag and title of the page not matching or having a very long title displayed on the SERP?
On-Page Optimization | | Myles921 -
Page title contents
In my page title, I have my product name. Is it beneficial to also include another keyword like: Buy wedding dress online Australia: e..g. (page title) amelie wedding dress | buy wedding dress online Australia. Or is it better just using: Amelie wedding dress
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Can you see multiple title elements
This came back in my on page grade for this url. http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/blog/choosing-the-right-towels.aspx Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice. Recommendation: Remove all but a single page title element. I can't see it, can you?
On-Page Optimization | | Towelsrus0 -
Minimum Title Tag Length
Hello everyone, I'm curious here, what is the minimum length a Title Tag should be so it doesn't receive the "Title Element Too Short" error here on SEOMoz? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | Michael-Goode0 -
Related keywords in title/H1 tag
Hi, I am trying to improve our rankings for pages with photos/images. For the title is it benificial to include keywords that are almost identical in nature? For example: "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" In Google trends photos and images are both commonly used words so including both seems like it would help. When I search for each one separately in Google (Brad Pitt Photos vs Brad Pitt Images) different sites are returned (except for the ones that include both image and photos keywords). I had read that Google knows that Images and Photos mean the same thing, but the search results do vary. I know stuffing all related combinations isn't good, but selective phrases seem to make a difference. Just want to verify if this makes sense. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | NicB10 -
Why does SEOmoz use /blog/content-title vs /category/content-title? Any difference?
Assume a brand new blog being designed and all other things equal. What are the pros & cons between using the url structure /blog/content-title vs. /category/content-title? Note:
On-Page Optimization | | JasonJackson
Both scenarios would be using categorical archiving.0