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Is there any benefit to removing brand name from the title tag?
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I just signed up for Moz recently, and have noticed that in my crawl errors, I have hundreds of issues with my title tag being too long. My business is selling prints for landscape/travel/nature photography, and I've built these pages dynamically to where the title tag for pages selling individual photos has the title of the photo for sale followed by a hyphen and then the brand name. The same goes for gallery pages "Gallery Name | Brand Name". Would it be worth it to shorten the title tags by removing the brand name from these pages? Or will that actually harm more than help?
Thanks in advance!
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I know this question is answered already but my 2c based on what we've changed about our onsites.
If your brand name includes a main keyphrase, we typically don't include it on every page. You basically end up "competing" with yourself for that keyphrase. There's no point having:
Syracuse Wedding Photographers | MyCompany Photography
and using that brand bit on every single page. You're over-telling Google that the page is photo related. (Photographers in general have this issue but it applies to MyCompany Plumbing and MyCompany Iphone Repair too.)
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I always include the brand name where I can, but if it is too long because of that I do not hesitate to drop the brand name.
For the titles, whilst I think about it from an SEO perspective, it is also important to think of it from a CTR perspective too. Sometimes you need that extra bit of description at the expense of the brand name. To give an example, on some articles I find it better to put the month and year at the end instead of the brand name to increase CTR. So basically, no I don't think it particularly matters, but it will vary on a case by case basis.
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Hey Mickey,
While brand is important on the site, I think you could probably get away with dropping it from depending on:
a. are general keywords ultimately driving more sales and traffic? - my guess is that being in the industry that you're in the answer is yes since it can expand your reach and audience much greater.
b. how often are you using the brand name throughout the rest of the site? - you could supplement the brand copy mentions with logo alt tags, H1 mentions, etc.I would include the brand ending on any title tag that it will fit in and definitely try to include it in the home page.
Hope that helps a bit!
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