Rankings tanked after sitewide title tag changes

[glasgowseoguy]

Hi Guys,

One of our clients are a big brand but their brand is a keyword domain.

After signing up to seo moz and utilising the recommended changes to the on page seo, something drastic happened.

Every page of my clients site appended the site name at the end of the title tag.

Example: <title>keyword | keyword 2 | domain name keyword</title>

I felt, and also with seomoz reports, that having the main keyword appended to the end of every title tag was far too spammy and as seo moz suggested could possibly have different pages fighting for ranks on that phrase.

We decide to remove the domain from the end on all page titles, and since google re cached the site, the rankings have tanked big time. The site is still indexed so thats good but when you consider a single lead is worth over £1000 to my client and with 20-30 leads per month, he isnt too happy.

Has anyone experienced this before? My guess is google is re evaluating the rankings to reflect the new title tags, and thus put my clients site out until it's finished updating the rankings etc?

Any help?

Thanks

[loopyal]

Hello Robert.

There seems to be a lot of reshuffling going on right now.

The old 80-20 rules still seem to apply. - 20% of the things you can do, account for 80% of the reasons for ranking well - or not.

Take this with a pinch of salt, because I don't have proof. It is really a conversation starter.

While not wanting to have a spammy title is a laudable goal, it is possible it was not only OK, because of the domain name and the name of the site, and its theme - but also the main reason it was ranking so well.

One thing you could try is to add back the domain name in one or two of the previously best-performing pages and see what happens. See if you can get a couple of new links into them, from a couple of busy (relevant) sites, and maybe a couple of social signals, to prompt the crawler to revisit quickly.