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We made a change in one of our sites that involved a major changes in page titles.
In two days traffic dropped about 65 percent. Painful.
But my hope is that it's because of search engines absorbing the change.
Is this normal?
If yes, how long does it take to recover?
thank you
Before we dig into this, let's make sure we've got the basic facts down...
Can you confirm that the major change is limited to page titles? Or are there other important changes, e.g., changes to URL's, sitewide nav, etc.?
Just want to be clear, as sometimes important information is left out of posts that entirely changes the equation.
Let's say as a page title I would have
Category Name > Article Title
I took out Category Name and only left Article Title
Thought this would be a wise move to make titles shorter.
The traffic in two days dropped more than 65 percent.
How long should I wait before deciding this was not a good idea.
Is this normal?
Should I wait untill I see the upstream back? or should I change back to where it was before?
In the case you lay out:
Category Name > Article Title
If the category name is "widgets" and the article title is "How to Use the Bronze Cast Style to Greatest Effect" ... you may have hurt your rankings for searches on "how to better use bronze cast widgets" ... since "widgets" is no longer in the title.
That said, we have seen some disturbingly negative short term results from site wide title changes that are much needed and more exacting in approach (i.e., designed to better help SE's understand the precise nature of each page).
We have so far not avoided making such changes on sites that really needed them, especially when titles were dups, or provided no useful information. But we do take into account the possiblity, if not probability, that large scale changes of this kind can cause short term issues.
Personally, I find the notion that SE's seem to be wary of this sort of thing nutty. I imagine all sorts of scenerios that cause them to want to make sites that do this "re-prove" themselves, given all the spam and shifty techniques out there that might relate sitewide title changes. But it's yet another case where the war on spam has had some seemingly disaterous side effects.
how do you know that the titles you had in the first place were the best? it is tempting to think that, simply because they got more traffic than the new ones. but they might have been underperforming too.
maybe now is as good a time as any to do some proper keyword research and see what search-terms people are using the most.
maybe you could tailor your titles and page copy to them instead. after a couple of months your traffic might be higher than what it was, and you'll be glad you took a drop.
A SEO friend suggested that I actually restor the category names in the page title but in the reverse order.
Originally things in regard to Page Titles looked like this
Category Name > Article Title
I know have this
Article Title Category Name
There are few positive things here
First in the previous scenario, you have thousands of articles starting with the same title keyphrases. In this present scenario you have each article having unique title and having the category keyword in them too.
If you noticed I removed > sign between article title and category
However, one problem I have is this
Let's say article title finishes with the category name and next comes the category title you have the same word one arter another
for example category is widget
article title is how to use this widget
your page title looks like
How to use this widget widget
you see we have widget widget twice in the page title. Wha to do?
I would normally do
How to do this widget > widget
But firend says > is not good for SEO purposes.
What would you recomend?
May be dash? like -
Or just leave it?
