Seeking thoughts on my title tag format

[lethal0r]

I have a site with thousands of categories & product.

current title tag format is:

<category/product name> ¦ buy & compare prices online ¦ <domainname.com>

is it a bad idea to have "buy & compare prices online" on all these pages?

would JUST <category/product name> ¦ <domainname.com>

be better?

[edited by: tedster at 6:28 pm (utc) on Aug. 14, 2009]

[tedster]

My personal opinion is yes, it is too much. I'd even question including the domainname in every title tag. If you feel you must do that, then the very end is a better spot than the beginning. But unless your site is a well recognized brand, then including the site's name in every title can actually scare away the potential click. The flip side is also true - a trusted site/brandname can draw the click.

But in cases like this, where it's just a guess or a hunch, it's probably best to start some testing before you change titles sitewide. You could even test a title that reversed the order of category/productname so it was productname/category - or even just productname. The very first words on the left of the title are what catches the users' eye the most easily. There's also some evidence that the keyword position [prominence] is factored into the ranking algo.

If your rankings and traffic are good, then also beware of changing all your titles at once. We've hade several reports here of penalties from large numbers of title tag changes.

[lethal0r]

thank you tedster. rankings are not amazing so i dont have too much to lose.

i have swapped "buy & compare prices online" for just "compare prices".

so now about 50% of each title tag is unique as opposed to all of them being over 75% the same.