Interesting, I never really considered Sailthru - which we use for a variety of functionality and CRM - to impact how the pages show up in SERPs. I did a search in Google News for "leafly cannabis" and I'm still finding this page to be the only one showing up with the name being pulled into the SERP title. It won't let me post this as an image attachment for some reason, but here's a screenshot of the first page, which also includes shorter titles that aren't having this issue (http://imgur.com/a/pGhdZ). I've looked at this specific page up and down and can't really find any other reason than that for the issue.

Thanks for taking a look!

Thank you for your response!

I'm using anything from "how to find best high," "best hight," and anything else I can think of that triggers it in the News results. And it's still showing up with "Patrick" in the title for all of them. I've also tested in Chrome Incognito mode, Safari private browser, and just a Google search on my logged in Chrome browser.

It's definitely keeping me stumped >__<

I was exploring my company's visibility in Google News results, and I noticed the author byline in a recently published article was being pulled into the page title in the SERP. See the attached image for a screenshot. It makes it sound awkward: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You Patrick..." - as if we're explaining it to some guy named Patrick?

We have the byline the same way in all other posts, but this is the first I've seen this happen. Has anyone seen/had this happen, and if so, have any ways to prevent it?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Here's the post URL: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-find-best-cannabis-experience-high

csvmF

I think our news section is beginning to fall into the "is this too big to not run the risk of duplicate content with tags" category - so that makes sense to me. And that's great you saw the organic search traffic increase; my guess it that it lessens any "dilution" of targeting from having too many similar pages.

I tend to use the subcategories/categories for the standalone "hub" pages on a topic, rather than the tag pages. And I agree that it's important to not have too many uses/not enough uses of a tag, which is really where the need for standardization comes into play.

I agree, I think it needs to be a nice blend of UX/SEO in the tagging (like most things) - use the insights from search to inform what users are interested in, but also frame them to make for the best UX.

Also, I tend to agree with you on the 10 being too many - but the nature of a lot of our articles leads to the need for multiple tags (state, city, etc.) since we publish a lot on laws/policies/regulations that happen in an area, and it also relates to other tags we use across the board. It's all a balance

Thanks for that visual! It breaks it down the differences pretty nicely.

We're trying to standardize the use of tags on our site amongst writers/editors, and I'm trying to come up a list of tags they can choose from to tag posts with - and telling them to use no more than 10 (absolute maximum) per post. We are also in the process of migrating to a new CMS, and have 8 defined categories that will all have their own landing page within our "News" section.

TLDR:

Do blog tags have any impact on SEO anymore? Are they solely meant to help users find articles related on popular topics, or does creating a tag for a popular topic help to improve organic visibility?

Full Question:

With the tag standardization, I want to make sure we're creating the most useful and effective tags; and the UX/SEO sides of my brain are conflicted. To my understanding, creating a tag about a high volume topic in an industry helps establish the website's relevance to Google/other search engines about that topic and improves overall relevance; but the tag feed page (ex: http://freshome.com/tag/home-protection/) isn't really meant for organic search visibility. So my other question is, is it worth it to noindex the tag pages in the robots.txt? Will that affect any benefit to increased relevance for Google (if there is any)?

I'm interested to hear others' thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks in advance!