Duplication in Meta Titles
-
Hi,
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch.Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition.
For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet CartridgesThey will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink.What are your opinions of the fact that:
a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title.The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first.
Cheers all!
-
Something in the title you sent triggered a thought and after checking I realized you're dealing with a .co.uk domain. I have found the .co.uk Google to be far more tolerant of heavy keyword use and even link spam so you're probably in a battle with folks who are indeed keyword stuffing or worse and finding yourself having to do the same just to keep up.
It's a bit of a slippery slope but I will admit that even some recent work I did in the UK required a slightly more heavy handed approach to SEO than I'd typically do. So while I wouldn't recommend it in the US, the title you're suggesting will probably work well in the UK.
Cheers !
Dave
-
Many thanks Dave.
To be honest I'm thinking about disregarding the 55 limit altogether and just keeping the length sensible and popping the important keywords towards the beginning of the title so it doesn't matter too much if / when it gets truncated.
For example, something like the following for a product listing:
'Canon PGI-520BK Compatible Inkjet Cartridge. Buy PGI-520 Ink at Refresh Cartridges.'
This covers the keywords Canon, Inkjet, Ink, Cartridge, Cartridges and the name of the product twice along with the inclusion of 'Buy' and the Company Name.
I don't think it looks hideously spammy but please do feel free to give me a slap if you think I may be about to make a terrible mistake
Thanks again.
-
Good question. I'm not sure exactly how I'd write it as it would depend on how your products are arranged. If you have pages for each of the different cartridges so you can target terms such as LC980BK independently then I'd probably go with something like:
Buy Brother DCP-197C Ink Cartridges from Domain.com
Of course he structure would differ by printer type as this model doesn't have any searches for phrases including "inkjet" so I'd skip including that. I also like the word "Buy" because if I'm looking up cartridges that's what I want to do.
Obviously testing is key though.
Hope that helps and best of luck ...
Dave
-
Many thanks for such a thorough and informative response. Pretty much none of our titles need to extend past 55 characters, it's just a case of whether it would be beneficial to cram some more potential keywords in
If I can be so cheeky, if you were to rewrite the example given of a competitors title 'Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink' to something more to your pallette what would it be? Obviously I appreciate you more than likely have no experience of our niche, I'm just curious.Thanks again for taking the time to reply.
-
It's always important to remember that every scenario is a bit different and that the title tag rules outlined by Moz are meant to be guidelines as opposed to gospel. There are times when the title may have to extend past the recommended character count though it's also important to remember that Google uses pixels as opposed to characters so some titles can have more characters than others.
Dr. Pete (from Moz himself) created a great tool at https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool that you can use to test titles. Whenever I hit one that needs to extend past the visual I like to use the tool to make sure that at least my marketing message is presented properly.
I'd personally focus on clicks and that might be something you want to dig in to. While your rankings went down it may be worth checking if your clickthroughs for a query to that page went up as a percentage of what would be expected given your position. If they did then you'll want to look at ways to boost your rankings with the given titles so when you do recover you recover with a higher clickthrough rate, if not then you may want to run some limited tests on some products to see what happens if you extend the titles back to what they were. I mention this to insure that there wasn't a coincidence issue occurring where your rankings dropped due to an update that was poorly timed with the title changes. It would be wise to look through your analytics, find the time of the drop and compare that with the algo change history page (also kept up-to-date by Dr. Pete ... busy guy) to help safeguard against reacting to the wrong issue.
I personally don't have a big issue with some limited keyword duplication provided it still reads right. I don't like what your competitor's title is but then ... I don't have to - only the searcher does.
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Do Meta Keywords matter?
I am a firm believer in the fundamentals of SEO but is there any data to support its impact positively or negatively towards a sites rank?
Technical SEO | | Brandonp0 -
Dup Title tags
I am frustrated....Google Webmaster tools shows this as dup title tags....I've fixed other oages with this issue, but can't figure this out?! here is the page itself... http://www.seadwellers.com/tag/padi-1/ I can't figure out where this freakin page even iS?! | 2 |
Technical SEO | | sdwellers
| <a id="zip_1-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>padi Archives - Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo, Florida Keys/category/padi//tag/padi/ | Any help with this thing wold be greatly appreciated...0 -
Issue Duplicate Page Title
I'm having some really strange issues with duplicate page titles and I can't seem to figure out what's going on. I just got a new crawl from SEOMOZ and it's showing some duplicate page titles. http://www.example.com/blog/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/2/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/3/ Repeat .............. I have no idea what's going on, how these were duplicated, or how to correct it. Does anyone have a chance to take a look and see if you can figure out what's happening and what I need to do to correct the errors? I'm using Wordpress and all in one SEO plugin. Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
Duplicate Page Title
The crawl of my website http://www.aboutaburningfire.com revealed an error showing a duplicate page title. Can someone please explain to me how to fix this? I'm not sure what it means or how to fix it. | House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/ 1 Pending Pending House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/index.html |
Technical SEO | | severity0 -
Meta refresh = 0 seconds
For a number of reasons I'm confined to having to do a client side redirect for html pages. Am I right in thinking that Google treats zero seconds roughly the same as proper 301 redirects? Anyone have experience with zero second meta refresh redirects, good or bad?
Technical SEO | | dvansant0