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Changing <title>

Will it change my position?

         

freitasm

7:22 am on Mar 20, 2005 (gmt 0)

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I current have a site with news and articles (plus forums). I was thinking of change the TITLE of each page with an article or news to be the actual headline (or forum subject), instead of simply my site's name.

Will it change my current position on Google, or PR (currently PR6)?

Anyone has done this without penalising the site, and with good results?

Thanks!

leadegroot

9:08 am on Mar 20, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



In theory, it should *improve* your ranking.
The title for each page should be individual, and reflect the topic of the page/keywords you are trying to rank for.
If all your pages have only the title of the site... theoretically its currently holding you back.
Of course any 'major' change like that is risky and scary! Good luck! :)

arrowman

12:15 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Yes, of course, yes.

incrediBILL

12:23 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Your titles should be 100% page context sensitive.

Your SERPs will SOAR!

I have a PR6 site with 100s of top 10 and 20 SERPs and it's 100% from having context sensitive titles site wide.

Before I made that change my pages were sometimes top 10/20, but more often 30-100.

After the change my traffic shot up almost 300% just the next month.

Your mileage may vary.

freitasm

1:37 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Thanks for the positive replies.

All my content is driven from a database. Using ASP what would be the best option to set the title? Have in mind that until the record is retrieved I don't have the content title, and the <head> is in a include file.

I've noticed that if I have a second <title> on my page, IE will show this instead of the first one.

How well Google will feel about this? Will the robot recognise this second title, or is there a script command on ASP that I can use to change the http headers being sent (seeing that my output is cached until the end of the script)?

Thanks!

freitasm

2:10 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Never mind... I'll change ther order where the include file comes in my script and code around it.

Thanks!

incrediBILL

2:16 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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



My site is also dynamic database driven.

Here's a hint you could pay big bucks to learn:

I actually manually set most of the page title based on the page content to get extra SERPs.

For instance, keyword WIDGET is in the page my title says "WIDGET, WIDGETS, WIDGET MAKER, WIDGET MAKERS, WIDGET SELLER, WIDGET SELLERS" etc.

Don't get too spammy, just the main keyword, it's plural, secondary keyword and plural, sometimes a 3rd but not often.

You could probably adapt as needed to your content, but this method works gang busters for me.

freitasm

2:27 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Hmmm. Good comment. What i'm actually doing now is just having the article's title in the <title> tag as well. Therefore "The Widget Guide" article shows the same in the title bar, and "How to apply xyz to Widget" does the same and so on...

It's live now. Google takes one or two days to spider my site (quite fast actually, since it takes only 5 minutes for news.google.com to get any new article).

Let's see the result :)

lovethecoast

2:30 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We too run dynamic sites, but every page gets a hand written title, keywords and description.

It's been a *very* big boom for us. We actually show up above some of our competitors when doing a search on them ;)

PR 5-6 here as well -- deep crawled by G all the time.

[edited by: lovethecoast at 2:46 am (utc) on Mar. 21, 2005]

freitasm

2:36 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Now a second question: my website name is now my Registered Trademark (yay!). Can I put a (R) symbol in the title (where the title is not related to a specific article), and will Google increase PR or consider it more autorithative because of the (R) symbol?

Cheers for all comments

incrediBILL

2:47 am on Mar 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

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



I don't think Google gives a (R)at dropping about that, but i could be wrong.

freitasm

8:08 am on Mar 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Ok, changed the <title> and have to say I'm surprised this time: Google seems to have 50% of my content pages (more than 4000) already showing in the search results with the new title - after only 24 hours.