Title tag solution for a med sized site
-
Its the same old story, we all know it well. I have a client that has a site with 20k+ pages (not too big) and traffic levels around 450k/month.
Now we have identified 15 pages with various conversion points/great backlink metrics etc. that we are going to explicitly target in the first round of recs. However, we are looking at about 18,000 dup title tags that I'd like to clean up.
The site is not on a CMS and in the past I've had the dev team write a script to adopt the h1 tag or the name of the page etc as the title tag. This can cause a problem when some of these pages that are being found in long tail search lose their positions etc. I'm more hesitant than ever to make this move with this current client because they get a ton of long tail traffic spread over a ton of original content they wrote.
How does everyone else usually handle this? Thoughts?
Thanks in advance Mozzers!
-
How about having your developers script something, that scrapes all 18.000 h1, h2, h3 for each article and store them in a database. Finding dupes then would be a piece of cake, even for a less experienced developer
You could easily export all your duplicates to csv and then manually rename them based on their content.
Dev time: about 1 day max. (Developed a lot of software myself and IMHO a good developer should get this up and running within 4 hours)
If you don't have toooooo many duplicate tags, correcting those in question shouldn't be taking too long aswell.
If you have done your chores
you could reimport your corrected title-tags to the database. Your developer could write a script in the meantime, that sets the title-tag of a page according to the title-tag you stated in your database.
Hope that helped
If you have further questions on this, just go ahead. Had a similar problem with 25k+ pages for a major health insurance and we figured out, that the best way to prevent problems was to do most of the work manually than with a script. Helped us a lot to stay within the budget and given timeframe.
-
This is sound advice. Test out a percentage of pages before rolling out the change site-wide.
I also agree that 18K duplicate titles isn't helping the site.
One thing I would do is review analytics and define the top X % pages and hand optimize those. The balance can be optimized via rules utilizing the system you outlined. As to whether to use the H1 or the file name or some other element, I'd probably lean towards the h1 as it would likely accurately describe the content and not be truncated or contain stop words.
-
-
Can you implement on a section or on a % of your pages first? then you can test the effect without risking your whole catalogue
-
Ryan - excellent points! The benefits of adding a CMS to this site would be quite good, at the very least for providing some sort of grounds for moving forward on a unified platform.
-
The 18k is a hard piece of the puzzle to wrap your mind around...I'd like to give more details there but can't...currently. Hopefully when this campaign starts to show results they will let me write a case for it...I'll be sure to share.
There is a "templating system" for various sections. However, as I mentioned, many developers have had their hands in it and didn't follow a standardized system.
I am considering EGOLs comment
Thanks!
-
Is there any form of standardization? I can't imagine 18k pages which were independently developed.
There should be a templating system or some logic which controls code common to all pages. Most pages should share the same header, footer and sidebar, along with standards for things like a canonicalization tag, title and meta description.
If that is not the case, the EGOL's comment should be considered. It is not reasonable to maintain a site which lacks standards.
-
It's possible that putting a reasonably intelligent human on the job for a couple of months could pay back big time. I'll bet a good title tag job would pull in thousands of dollars worth of sales every month.
-
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the response!
There was 18k title tag duplicates but top content that I can tell is being found in search is about 1,500 pages. Its not a forum site or a site with UGC. Its a very successful tech hardware company that has put out a lot of great unique content over time.
Determining the logic is the tough part because there isn't a lot of consistency throughout the site...different developers have had their hands in it over time.
-
What kind of site is it?
With 18k+ pages I will take a guess that it is a forum site. Definitely check with your forum software provider. There should be some form of "page container" which is used as a template for all the site's pages. If you can determine the logic you want to use, such as go with the post title or H1 tag, then you can modify the template according to your logic and take care of your entire site quickly and easily.
-
Thanks for the response! I should rephrase my question...
I'm either looking for tricks/tips others use in this situation or messages like yours that will give me the confidence to go for it haha.
I think we've all experienced the fear of doing what we know is technically correct and risk being at the mercy of the algo. I've gone this route a lot in the past but I've never done it on a site that gets traffic so deep into so many pages from search.
Have you ever gone the script route? If so, what did you have it pull to use as a title tag? Like I mentioned above, I usually have used h1's in the past..
-
If a lot of traffic is coming in through 18,000 pages that have duplicate title tags I am willing to bet that there will be a huge increase in the amount of traffic that those pages pull when unique and relevant title tags are put in place.
So, although there is a small chance that traffic will go down, I think that there is a much higher chance that traffic will immedately shoot up spectacularly - and the quality of that traffic might also improve.
I would archive the site, run a script to replace the title tags, see what happens. You can always put the old title tags back up if this doesn't work - but I bet it works great.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Site Migration
Hi, I have been researching the best way to migrate six sites into one, since I have never done it, and I am frankly overwhelmed. Some resources say to do it incrementally, and a/b test; but I would prefer not to have to do it, as won't it present a disjointed representation for visitors? The previous sites are older and a bit clumsy compared to the new design and functionality in the new site. Can someone please tell me the right way to approach this? Or tell me the best resource for a step-by-step prep, migrate, and watch process? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1230 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Same Alt tag on the images
Can We have same alt tags on all the images? Below pages have images with same alt tag "astrologer Ravi sharma". I used name of the person on every image. before today, all images were shown in google images but today no image is there. any comment. Like - http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/astrologer-ravi-sharma-photos/ http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/gallery/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Rankings tanked after sitewide title tag changes
Hi Guys, One of our clients are a big brand but their brand is a keyword domain. After signing up to seo moz and utilising the recommended changes to the on page seo, something drastic happened. Every page of my clients site appended the site name at the end of the title tag. Example: <title>keyword | keyword 2 | domain name keyword</title> I felt, and also with seomoz reports, that having the main keyword appended to the end of every title tag was far too spammy and as seo moz suggested could possibly have different pages fighting for ranks on that phrase. We decide to remove the domain from the end on all page titles, and since google re cached the site, the rankings have tanked big time. The site is still indexed so thats good but when you consider a single lead is worth over £1000 to my client and with 20-30 leads per month, he isnt too happy. Has anyone experienced this before? My guess is google is re evaluating the rankings to reflect the new title tags, and thus put my clients site out until it's finished updating the rankings etc? Any help? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | glasgowseoguy0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0 -
Title tag showing in Google that we are not setting
Hello, We've noticed that when we do a specific search (print screen attached), that the business name and/or a completely different title is getting indexed into the search engine that we are not setting. Below is an example from the source code of how we're setting the title, this matches the 2nd listing circled in the attached image. The indexed title tag reflects "Animal Business Card Holders - Kyle Design" Any ideas or feedback on how this is happening? <title>Animal Business Card Cases in Pet, Insect and Wildlife Designstitle> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <meta name="description" content="Eye-catching business card holder cases personalized with custom animal designs for humane professionals and pet owners. Custom select a sleek metal finish, bold aluminum or iridescent accent color, size and unique design for the ultimate self-expressing animal gift!" /> <meta name="keywords" content="business card holder unique personalized custom holders silver gold wood metal cards cases sleek aluminum engraved contemporary case animal animals design designs black color accents iridescent pet insect wildlife cat dog dragonfly butterfly lions sea turtles sea otters elephants animal lover animal activist zoologist veterinarian breeder animal whisperer thin deep large credit Asian size engraving personalize gift gifts special monogram customized corporate logo name professional title meaningful sentiment" /> <meta name="copyright" content="Copyright Kyle Design" /> <meta name="author" content="Kyle Design" />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing_zoovy.com
<meta name="generator" content="xyz Commerce System http://www.domain.com/" />
<link rel="canonical" href="xyz link"
<script type="text/javaScript"> Thanks,
Jamie0