Leap of Faith - Damm the consequences - Title Tag Change
-
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...
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Traffic to blog home page is going down after changing my WordPress Theme
I recently changed my wordpress theme from a standard free theme to a newer theme. The home page I switched up a bit adding more calls to action to some of our top posts and leading people to popular categories and so on. This greatly improved the usability of our site as it allowed us to highlight new posts. The previous free template simply listed 10 of our most recent posts on a page with small snippets and then you had to move to the next page to keep reading. Since switching my theme the blog traffic has stayed relatively level. That being said, the specific posts traffic is going up a lot whereas the organic traffic to the blog homepage is now nearly depleted. Is this a common thing to happen or is there anything I can do to fix this issue?
Content Development | | saultienut0 -
Use Of H1 Tags
I just have a quick question. I have seen a few people mention that the use of more than 1 H1 tag has little bearing on things. I am trying to sort out a site for a friend and it has 2 H1 tags. My issue is that it is ranking for a quite competitive keyword (don't know how as the whole site layout is a total mess) but in my efforts to clean up the site I am wondering if I should actually reduce the No of H1 Tags to 1 or leave 'as is' for fear of breaking something. Thanks Paul
Content Development | | propertyhunter0 -
Correction Duplicate Page Title Problems for a Blog
EDITED: To just focus on the issue at hand. I am trying to figure out the SEO rules instead of just working on the content. Please bear with me. I am adept technically. I just do not know the rules of the SEO process or even some of the termology. So I’m trying to attack problems one at time. Today’s problem – **Duplicate Page Titles ** We evidently have thousands of Duplicate Page Titles. We are using Joomla 2.5 & Easyblog. Our sitemap is automated from XML Sitemap Easyblog takes the title of the sites and uses it for a name of the summary pages. We post 5 blog items per page and all the names are the same. http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=5 Page Title = Site Name http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=10 Page Title = Site Name A similar thing happens on the sorting by Author or Category etc etc. Basically non-duplicate pages are looking like duplicates. What is the best practice / approach? Using the Robot.txt or XML Sitemap to tell Google not to crawl these pages? Writing a script or edit the Easyblog code to edit the 2000 duplicate Page Titles? Other thoughts?
Content Development | | Romana0 -
Marking our content as original, where the rel=author tag might not be applied
Hello, Can anyone tell, if it is possible to protect text –type content without the rel=author tag? We host a business listing site, where, apart from the general contact information, we have also started to write original 800+ character-long unique and original contents for the suppliers, where we expect visits, so rankings should be increased. My issue is that this is a very competitive business, and content crawling is really an everyday practice. Of course, I would like to keep my original content or at least mark it as mine for Google. The easiest way would be the author tag, but the problem is, that I do not want our names and our photos to be assigned to these contents, because from one hand, we are not acknowledged content providers on our own (no bio and whatsoever), and on the other hand, we provide contents for every sort of businesses, so just having additional links to our other contents, might not help readers to get what they want. I also really do not think that a photo of me could help increase the CTR from the SERP:) What we currently do, is that we submit every major fresh content through url submission in WMT, hoping that first indexing might help. We have only a handful of them within a day, so not more than 10. Yes, I could perhaps use absolute links, but this one is not a feasible scenario in all cases, and about DMCA, as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own. So finally, I do not mind our contents being stolen, as I can’t possibly prevent this. I want however our original content to be recognized as ours by Google, even after the stealing is done. (Best would be an ’author tag for business’, so connected to our business Google+ page, but I am not aware, this function can be used this way.) Thank you in advance for all of you, sharing your thoughts with me on the topic.
Content Development | | Dilbak0 -
Duplicate page title on blog
Is this something I should b concerned about? I get about 6 posts per page with unique titles - however the title per page is not unique. Is this important?
Content Development | | MartinSpence460 -
What is your opinion about: SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 (WP plugin)
The purpose of this plugin is to strengthen our On Page SEO by adding new internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by search engine visitors to find the blog post from a search engine ( incoming search terms ). We can also display the most popular & recent search terms in the sidebar to get a side wide internal linking to the corresponding blog post. New since version 1.25: Automatically convert popular search terms into Post Tags.
Content Development | | cdrdz870 -
H1 tag in Blank in Wordpress website
Good evening, I have noticed using some h1 checkers, that my primary h1 tag is blank. I manually introduced an h1 with my main keywords, but system recognises as 2 different h1 tags, and therefore it could be harmful for my SEO purposes. I created my wordpress website using Artisteer. Is there any specific way (or plugin) to change this primary h1 tag so it wont appear as blank? My site is www.outletspain.net Thanks in advance Maria Jesus
Content Development | | goperformancelabs0 -
Tagging Your Blog Posts - Useful?
Has anyone demonstrated measurable value from routinely tagging your posts? I am of the mindset that what is good for a user/reader is good for SEO and therefore the posts should be tagged. I wanted to see if anyone else had specific experience to the positive or negative.
Content Development | | SWKurt0