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Google adding sitename to titles, twice.

         

darkyl

5:15 pm on Mar 21, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Let's say my website is centered about "widgets".

The domain name itself is a popular phrase that companies widely use in my country as the title for their job offerings page so it's something like:

www.widgetwithus.ex

The website lists companies and have corresponding page titles like:
Widget Company Name

Some time ago, Google started changing titles adding the domain name, which is quite normal so in the serps they became:
Widget Company Name - Widgetwithus.ex

Lately for some reason Google decided to add "Widget with us" after the domain name and the result is:
Widget Company Name - Widgetwithus.ex - Widget with us

Which not only looks bad but it's also redundant.

A couple of considerations:

1. Pages rank fairly well for both "widget company name" and "company name widget with us" even if "widget with us" is not present on the pages, not even in the page headings or content.

2. Since Google started to give less importance to domain names, rankings for "company name widget with us" degraded slighlty but noticeably and other sites that include "widget with us" in the page titles have taken over.

My questions:

1. Any idea about why Google is adding both the sitename AND "widget with us" to every page?

2. Do you think it might me a good idea to spontaneously change page titles to "Widget Company name" or "Company name widget with us"

3. If changing titles is a good idea, is it a good idea to change them on 400 pages alltogether?

Thanks

aakk9999

2:07 am on Mar 22, 2014 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Google has been changing titles for some time, which can be very frustrating. You may want to try to change a title on couple of pages and see if this fixes the problem as well as how it affects the ranking.

There was a member who couple of years ago changed their titles sitewide on 20,000 pages to remove one keyword and his site lost rankings [webmasterworld.com...] . The same may not happen to you, but if the test couple of pages show that the change of title is beneficial, I would be careful and would not change all titles in one go.

darkyl

9:57 am on Mar 22, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for your reply.

That's what I did, i changed titles on a couple on pages and on WMT used the "view as Google" functionality.
I was surprised to see that the titles changed in the serps immediately. I mean the new titles appeared in less than five minutes, with no ranking changes.

Unfortunately the new title has the same structure as before.
New widget title - Widgetwithus.ex - Widget with us.

I guess I'll have to wait some more to see if rankings are effected and check the titles again.

And I agree with you on bulk changing the titles, it might be dangerous. If I'll change them I will do it manually, even if time consuming to send a less "artificial" change to Google.

Richard Adams

7:28 pm on Mar 24, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Just a quick question here: are you using a CMS and onpage SEO plugin?

I've had a few hiccups over the last few years with Wordpress combined with a few of the more popular plugins (Yoast in particular) that have caused problems like you mentioned previously.

Seems unlikely from what you've said but just wanted to explore all the possibilities...

darkyl

8:01 pm on Mar 24, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm using a cms but I don't think it could be the problem since the generated code only outputs the correct title, without domain and repetitions.