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The 2nd title is certainly over optimized. I gave it as an example, but it's not the main point.

My main discussion question is if a short title tag would have better rankings over a long title tag. Here's the logic.

The SE's really care about what is in the far left of the title tag. As you move further to the right the less the search engine cares about it. Other key phrases would have diminishing returns the farther right you get. If you are only optimizing for one key phrase it would, by default, be located in the far left of the title tag.

Would this short title tag then have a higher CTR? Would users see this shorter title tag as more direct and trustworthy because it does not look spammy.

A higher click through rate would then have a positive impact on SERPs (as it is believed to be factored into the overal results algorithm).

Also, as an unknown factor, is there any evidence that SE's weighs a page more heavily if it is optimized for one key phrase rather than a few?

Have any tests been done optimizing for just 1 phrase in the Title Tag to measure CTR?

If the above points are true, then it would we a cost/benefit analysis of whether a higher CTR is worth not having extra key phrases targeted after your primary key phrase.

Your point is well taken. While technically the 2nd page title is a sentence, it would appear spammy to the user. Thus leading to a lower CTR, and then to a lower ranking overall.

Thanks for your advice,

Is there any evidence that SEs give a greater weighting to keyword phrases in the page title if there are less characters?

For example:

1. "Buy Silver Bullion"

2. "Buy Silver Bullion Coins Bars Rounds Easily Privately Securely"

The key phrase I am trying to optimize for is "Buy Silver Bullion."

To my knowledge, current practices would say the 2nd phrase is better optimized since it contains more keywords and it has a few USPs.

But is there any evidence that the 1st example would be higher ranked in google for the phrase "Buy Silver Bullion" because it is more focused than the 2nd?

Alan,

Thank you for your thoughts. I agree we need to change our strategy and move away from scraped content. Any technical work arounds we try to do (like iFrame) may work now, but ultimately we seem to just be delaying the inevitable.

Since that strategy will take a while to implement, what would you recommend for the shorter term?

Hello Seomoz members. I'm relatively new to SEO, so please forgive me if my questions are a little basic.

One of the sites I manage is GoldSilver.com. We sell gold and silver coins and bars, but we also have a very important news aspect to our site.

For about 2-3 years now we have been a major hub as a gold and silver news aggregator. At 1.5 years ago (before we knew much about SEO), we switched from linking to the original news site to scraping their content and putting it on our site. The chief reason for this was users would click outbound to read an article, see an ad for a competitor, then buy elsewhere. We were trying to avoid this (a relatively stupid decision with hindsight).

We have realized that the Search Engines are penalizing us, which I don't blame them for, for having this scraped content on our site.

So I'm trying to figure out how to move forward from here. We would like to remain a hub for news related to Gold and Silver and not be penalized by SEs, but we also need to sell bullion and would like to avoid loosing clients to competitors through ads on the news articles.

One of the solutions we are thinking about is perhaps using an iFrame to display the original url, but within our experience. An example is how trap.it does this (see attached picture). This way we can still control the experience some what, but are still remaining a hub.

Thoughts?

Thank you,

nick

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