Dynamic title tag an SEO mistake?

[koncept]

Hi folks,

I run a lot of adwords campaigns and I have some php running on my pages that dynamically populates the title tag on my index page with the search query from the user's google search.

I have noticed that my sites are well like by adwords, but the organic google results are not promising and getting worse.

I've started to think that maybe it's this ever-changing title tag that is the problem. The index page stays the same but the title keeps changing as well as some other things like an h1 tag. Does google expect titles to remain somewhat constant and is a changing title tag a flag of some sort?

[topr8]

what does the title and h1 read when the referer is not google - that's what googlebot sees.

[lucy24]

when the referer is not google

When the referer is not anything, in fact, and there is no search string. Would g### even know about the alternative titles?

In any case, seems like it would be confusing and/or annoying to humans too: "Oh, wait, I'm on the wrong page. I'm looking for the one called Widgets Galore" or possibly "What is this ###? This is the identical page I found yesterday when I was looking for miniature widgets."

Could come out as a weird twist on Duplicate Content.

[netmeg]

FWIW I typically NOINDEX PPC landing pages.

[koncept]

The dynamic title and h1 are actually only triggered by specific adwords ads by using a dynamic parameter based on the user search.

Organic searches always see the same default.

But because of the dynamic page titles triggered adwords, I'm assuming google has seen and perhaps logged all the versions. That's where I'm thinking a problem may lay.

In fact, I was on yahoo once and saw that they were actually indexing all the different variations which was cool because I was coming up for many different keywords.


Perhaps the key lays in putting something in an htaccess file telling the engines to not log the same url with different /?keyword= paramenters as different pages...

[koncept]

netmeg... even if your ppc landing page is the index page of the website?

[netmeg]

My PPC landing page is never the index page of the website.

[koncept]

Are there any technical or seo reasons for this?

Just wondering if there is any reason for this besides creating a more customized page for a specific campaign..?

[lucy24]

Perhaps the key lays in putting something in an htaccess file telling the engines to not log the same url with different /?keyword= paramenters as different pages...

You could easily chop off the query and send the search engines to the generic page. Whether it would count as Seving Different Content probably depends on what proportion of your human users get that same generic page.

In the specific case of g###, there's a Parameters option in GWT where you can tell it to disregard certain parameters. But then instead of getting multiple pages with almost-identical content they'd be getting a single page with ever-changing content. I'm not absolutely sure that's an improvement.

Overdue question: If the page is only created after the user requests it, and its title and <h1> are ultimately determined by their search terms, wouldn't that mean that the title of the page they end up on is different from the title of the page in the SERP that they clicked on? You'd better be selling some damn good widgets, because I'm not even on your site and already I'm confused :)