Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
hopefully i'll rank higher for the second then the first since 1,800 is better then nothing.
Definitely the smart way to approach this. You might even eventually end up ranking for just "widgets."
The length of time it will take for the serps to reflect your change will vary according to when in the spidering/indexing cycle you've caught things. I'd noted a while back, on a page with a title change that had just missed new caching, that the new title and rankings took 8 days to appear on Google.
Robert, index page was cached on sep 1, but thats cool, wonder how long it will take my position at 500 to drop off based on the new title :)
[edited by: youfoundjake at 4:23 pm (utc) on Sep. 6, 2007]
Google doesn't give numbers but does give recommendations here:
[adwords.google.com...]
Robert, index page was cached on sep 1, but thats cool, wonder how long it will take my position at 500 to drop off based on the new title
Let us know when you see a change. Again, your time may vary. I trust you understand that onpage content must reflect the title, and that each optimized page requires a unique title.
onpage content must reflect the title, and that each optimized page requires a unique title
onpage content must reflect the title, and that each optimized page requires a unique title
Just make sure your description tag is not a duplicate of your on page copy.
Just make sure your description tag is not a duplicate of your on page copy.
Really?
My description tag usually is a well defined sentence from the page itself. I started doing that after seeing the serps displaying my navigation menu in the snippets. After the change, the snippet was definitely more informative..
But can it cause an issue?
It's my experience that I can edit an existing page title and see results within a week of when it was last cached.
Be careful you don't over optimize or you may see a negative result instead.
PS. Older trusted sites can edit titles and get the above result. Newer sites better not touch the titles very often or it may cause a drop in rank instead.
[edited by: Lorel at 12:32 am (utc) on Sep. 7, 2007]
What I don't understand ( i really do, just choose to not accept) is how a news article or pdf file about my niche can rank higher then my WHOLE site dedicated to it!
Keep in mind that Google isn't ranking a site... it's ranking a page, albeit the other pages in your site might help you.
News articles generally get a transitory bump but don't stay up there unless they get some good inbound links.
PDFs rank if they have good links pointing to them and if various elements like the file title, the file context, and the title on the first page of the pdf happen to fit the query. Google has goone through phases of favoring pdfs in an attempt to find a good balance.
It's clear that Google has been playing around with featuring a variety of file types and media over the years, and now with Universal Search that variety is going to get bigger.
Just make sure your description tag is not a duplicate of your on page copy.
I've read over and over that this is a fine practice. On what do you base this?
Just make sure your description tag is not a duplicate of your on page copy.
Don't mean to pile on, but my experience shows no penalty from using description text for page text or vice versa. (In fact, I have some short pages where all the body text is only description tag text. Nothing more.)
I don't see any basis for Google to hate it, especially when it is supposedly more keen on short pages than ever before, and frankly see no loss to the site visitors.
On the contrary, I can see how a match would help visitors, and in fact be a conscientious, deliberate decision of webmasters.
Finally, I really don't think Google is that sophisticated in its page analysis (yet) to care if there's body text and description tag "duplication."
I still have some old sites constructed before I knew anything about SEO which still have description tags the same as title tags, but they still rank well in Google SERPs.
The only reason why Google might care is the assumption that template- or auto-generated sites are more likely to match body text and description tags.
But the SE has many other ways to figure out what is scraped/auto-gen'd and since penalizing matching would cause unnecessary collateral damage, it doesn't use it as a standard for penalties.
p/g
When I search for blue widgets (old title) im still listed about position 500, and the old title is reflected, with a cache date of sept 1
When I search for blue widgets online (new title) I'm now popping up around 26, can't remember what it was previously, have to check my docs at home since im writting this at my daytime job.
But the interesting thing is that the Title in the Serps is blue widgets online, but still showing the same cache date of sept 1.
Sep 5, 2007 01:08:16 GMT.
side note:
should the title of the rss file and xml file be different from each other?
The external tool draws a graph of any two (or more) search terms.
If you ALREADY know the results from one, you can compare the
two graphs and figure out the traffic.
All you need to know is (you or somebody) sitting sitting on a search term in the #1 or #2 position. (Assuming that's your goal) How many hits do they get.
Then just use the external tool graphs to compare
that traffic with your target term.
Combine your pages together. 3000 words of ON TOPIC material is not too much. You'll whip those other pages. There is no "Too Much Relevant Content For One Page" penalty. Nor too many links.
I'm about 25 now for that term, and the original term buy widgets is bouncing back and forth from 590-610, so there has not been to drastic of a change. Just goota bide my time as the SERPS ebb and flow from adding 6 million pages of junk and then dropping those 6 million pages.
Which is wierd, why does results for the term go from
11 million to 14 million to 19 million then back down to 11 million in the span of a week?
The whole lot runs on data from several different places that are never in sync. There can be a lag of more than a day for all sides to catch up with each other.
(I was going to start a new thread but I figured this was too closely related to this thread so I tacked it on here. Sorry if it seems like piggybacking...)
I haven't seen data on this, but I'd guess that pages seeing title changes would be a very small slice of the total pages on the web. Most sites do not make tweaks very frequently - or ever.
I'd worry, though, about ranking so deep for the original 2-word term. Your placement in the high 500's is really, really deep.
Is your content a little short? Confused with other subjects? Duplicated? I'd really think about this possibility.
I mention this because an old problem could hold you back from ever getting much higher than #25 for the new title term, and I'm sure you're shooting for top 6 or 7.
Yeah, its a big deal to ME, as I've only been doing this for a little over year, and unfortunately started out based on one of the most competitive niches there is without me knowing it. :P
Heeh, yeah, and I owe most of this to the wisdom of the folks at WebmasterWorld. Hopefully I can get to a place to where I can afford to make the donations. :)
Did I change it to early? What is going to happen when Google starts to reflect the new title change? Is my sudden rise in ranking (over 450 places) going to disappear?
Should I change the title back to the original now that I am ranking higher?
My new title search still puts me at about 26, with the new title not showing.
Also, as g1smd suggested earlier on this thread... and I recommend that you reread his post... it's quite possible for the cache to be out of sync with what Google is using to rank you.
Best to be a bit more patient than you've been.
