Leap of Faith - Damm the consequences - Title Tag Change

[kdaly100]

the crazy things we do mid week. But after reading Cyrus' post on beating Panda I went back to my website design site http://www.grangewebdesign.com which I had set up a plugin which had all my posts setup as

Website Design - %%title%%

So basically every Title tag had Website Design in front of it.  REadingthis post now it suggests that this is bad practice so I just changed it to

%%title%%

which now of course means that I should perhaps look more closely at the titees I have been using.

Was embedding   the Website Design in front of the post overkill?

thoughts appreciated...

[kdaly100]

Thanks Joe - not every post is about it so I think I might just revert a little bit to more manually massaging titles and work a bit on my whole structure.  I have about 100 posts and they all append this tag which probably a bit too much.

[reallygoodstuff]

I think varying the title tag was a good practice long before Panda.

Is "website design" the broader subject of every post?

The way I read that article, he seemed to be suggesting that numerous articles targeting variants of the keyword phrase would be so semantically similar that it would flag the site as a content farm.

I don't think that's the same thing as a templated title tag for a site optimizing for a keyword phrase.

The only thing about your specific example that might be different is the phrase itself. "Website design" is highly competitive,l and Google is on the record that they would sometimes manually manage the SERPs for ultra-competitive terms.

But, I suspect that there are plenty of sites with a title tag like yours that are ranking fine. Think of how many blogs would be penalized if they were going after that title tag construction!

I don't think it's overkill.