Big drop in placement after updating page titles?

[ichthyous]

Hi there, I recently updated the titles of almost all of my pages because Google was rewriting the titles for me. I made the titles a lot more concise and dropped any repeated keywords. But I've also been playing around with them an awful lot...multiple title changes over the course of the last month or so. Nothing has stopped Google from rewriting the titles, but this morning I notice that I plummeted for some searches that I have been at the top for for many years. I was in 1st-3rd place this weekend for some terms and now I'm at the bottom of page two today! I'm afraid I've triggered some kind of penalty by making changes to all my titles at once. Another change I made this weekend was adding the rel=canonical meta tag to specify the url on each page. I have been having dupe page title and desc issues so though that might help. In WMT I noticed a big sudden drop in dupe page titles, down by hundreds of pages to only 30 now. I would think that would help not hurt...Any advice on this?

[Vuffy]

I had to do something similar.

Google had been automatically appended my brand behind all page titles in serps. One day, I noticed they decided my brand should be spelled differently... Adding a space between the word, effectively changing my brand name.

So for the first time in years, I had to add my brand to all my pages. Didn't notice any substantial dip in traffic due to the change.

But your case may be entirely different since you're rewriting the titles completely, thus you may have incurred an over optimization flag or even tripped the patent with regards to making seo changes in response to algo updates.

I would wait it out and see. Also stop making changes to the titles.

[Leosghost]

"zig zag"..got you ..you did a thing only SEOs would do..
[webmasterworld.com...]

[ichthyous]

I am looking at it again and wondering if maybe it's not the title changes. I also added rel=canonical tags to my headers on each page. THis morning I checked them again and noticed that the url was not correct on every page. For example, my site has albums with numbered pages...page 1,2,3,4 etc. The canonical links were pointing only to the main page and didn't include the page numbers. This seems like a huge mistake and I wish I had caught it earlier. I have removed the tags entirely for now and I hope that it won't take too long for google to reindex those pages again

[Martin Ice Web]

"zig zag"..got you ..you did a thing only SEOs would do..

Matt Cutts says they donīt use it.

ichthyous, i did the very same thing. New titles, canonical tag, added addthis

and

my site got a big huge hit with this last updates. I wonder if it is the addthis toolbar?!

[ichthyous]

Make sure you have canonical tags properly implemented. I just discovered that mine were not. I don't think the addthis toolbar per se would help you...in fact if you check it with PageSpeed you'll see how much extra junk it loads, slowing down the page rendering and linking out to god knows what. I didn;t want that on my page anymore. However, I think that now my pages have no externally pointing links...that may be a problem and push the page down. In my case the drop was huge in one day. From #1 to bottom of page two. It seems like just replacing a social media toolbar wouldn;t produce such a drop

[Leosghost]

Matt Cutts has said / says many things..I believe very few of them..he is very economical with the truth..very generous with the FUD..

I have found over the years, that, amongst other things, treating what Matt Cutts says with a great deal of skepticism, has meant that I don't have problems before, during, and after updates..

[scooterdude]

Matt Cutts says they donīt use it.

everytime i read that quote from adult webmasters, I wonder what happened to 1,000 of years of human evolution

Said the friendly Lion king to the Plains dwelling early man," My lovely wives only eat Antelope, feel free to let your kids roam the grass lands unattended,and in fact, my cute 1 years will look after them, look after your kids that is"

in case you're wondering , Lions don't speak, Search engines have no incentive to love SEO's, and the estimed Google spokesman probably doesn't work for webmasterworld

So if your actual experience differs from what you're being told, perhaps a re think might be helpful

[Martin Ice Web]

uuuhh scooterdude, you donīt have to be abusive only because a get the whole clue out of all.

It was his direct answer on this particular question.Out of 500 questions, he answered this one?!
I know that this whole good content thing is nonsens and they are on a journey to get the big money.

[scooterdude]

Sorry, i was trying to be jocular,

I was also a member of the 'Matt Cutts says ' brigade too at a time, but i re iterate , if i am told something, but i notice the opposite is happening everytime, it became very had to continue accepting what i was being told as the 'verite'

[ichthyous]

Has anyone else seen a big drop after adding the rel=canonical metas to their pages? I am also wondering if Google may have recently updated the algo to strongly favor sites with lots of Google+ followers and social media presence in general. I am seeing sites coming out of nowhere and ranking highly now, and they seem to have a big presence in google+. Anyone else seeing that?