Help choosing titles

[seo-wanna-bs]

Good evening guys, I changed my titles last month, in preparation for the over optimisation penalty and the result was an instant and quite dramatic loss in traffic.

I believe the reason is, the change resulted in a lot of duplicate titles.

My website is similar to deviant art, but for mobile phones. So the titles include the brand of mobile phone for example.

The titles were: Upload name + Brand + Content type - 3 tags - FILEID

So an example would be Black Nokia wallpaper - black, abstract, grey - 12345

I changed them to Black Nokia wallpaper by artist name on domain name.

But this resulted in thousands of duplicate titles and a dramatic loss in traffic. For example a user could upload 20 black wallpapers.

With this in mind, I need to change my titles and fast. But I don't want to make another mistake.

The one I am quite keen to try is:

Black Nokia Wallpaper - Tag1, tag2 wallpapers - on domain name.

So the main variable would be the name of the upload and then the 2 tags, to mix things up a little.

Another option would be to throw the file ID in there somewhere? As that will always be unique. Perhaps the file ID could be in the place of the "wallpapers" after the two tags?

I'd like to keep the domain name, for branding reasons.

Any other suggestions are warmly welcomed.

Thanks a lot.

[BenFox]

Do your title tags also determine how you link internally and are they inserted dynamically into content on the page?

If not then (and let me know if I'm being dim-witted here) I don't see anything massively wrong with the first set of titles. Could you roll back and do a quick test to see if it works?

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Ben, the titles don't effect how things are linked internally, that's all dealt with in other ways.

I could of course roll back the titles to exactly how they were before. But as I'm changing them, I just wanted to ensure they were as optimal as possible.

Thanks

[seo-wanna-bs]

Oh, also I really want to still include my brand name in the title. Which wasn't present prior.

[BenFox]

But not too optimal right?

I don't have any suggestions apart from test your new variations and see. Although it sounds like introducing stricter naming conventions might help as well.

[seo-wanna-bs]

Haha well yes, in this case, optimal would be not too optimised.

Testing worries me, as I fear Google will think I'm trying to reverse engineer and smack me with the biggest stick they have.

I am hoping my first change, has the desired result.

[jgower]

The drop in rankings could be just because you changed the titles.  For some reason google doesn't like it when you change titles, perhaps because it signals them that you're trying to change them in order to rank?

Anyhow, I've changed titles on one of our home pages twice in the last 3 or so months.  I wish I would have just left it alone...each time my rankings dropped, then started to climb.  I'm basically where I was to begin with now before I changed anything and I'm leaving it alone now!

Anyhow, I'd make one more change to get rid of most of the duplicates and then leave it alone.  That said, I like:

Upload Name - tag, tag - Brand (fileid)

[seo-wanna-bs]

Jeremy, I could not agree more. It was among the worst decisions I've made in the seven years of working with websites.

It was completely knee jerk and plain dumb.

I think the drop was likely partly due to such a site wide change and then due to the duplicate pages that then resulted.

Thanks for the input.