Duplication in Meta Titles

[ChrisHolgate]

Hi,
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch.

Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition.

For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges

They will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink.

What are your opinions of the fact that:

a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title.

The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first.

Cheers all!

[BeanstalkIM]

It's always important to remember that every scenario is a bit different and that the title tag rules outlined by Moz are meant to be guidelines as opposed to gospel.  There are times when the title may have to extend past the recommended character count though it's also important to remember that Google uses pixels as opposed to characters so some titles can have more characters than others.

Dr. Pete (from Moz himself) created a great tool at https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool that you can use to test titles.  Whenever I hit one that needs to extend past the visual I like to use the tool to make sure that at least my marketing message is presented properly.

I'd personally focus on clicks and that might be something you want to dig in to.  While your rankings went down it may be worth checking if your clickthroughs for a query to that page went up as a percentage of what would be expected given your position.  If they did then you'll want to look at ways to boost your rankings with the given titles so when you do recover you recover with a higher clickthrough rate, if not then you may want to run some limited tests on some products to see what happens if you extend the titles back to what they were.  I mention this to insure that there wasn't a coincidence issue occurring where your rankings dropped due to an update that was poorly timed with the title changes.  It would be wise to look through your analytics, find the time of the drop and compare that with the algo change history page (also kept up-to-date by Dr. Pete ... busy guy) to help safeguard against reacting to the wrong issue.

I personally don't have a big issue with some limited keyword duplication provided it still reads right.  I don't like what your competitor's title is but then ... I don't have to - only the searcher does.

[ChrisHolgate]

Many thanks for such a thorough and informative response. Pretty much none of our titles need to extend past 55 characters, it's just a case of whether it would be beneficial to cram some more potential keywords in  
If I can be so cheeky, if you were to rewrite the example given of a competitors title 'Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink' to something more to your pallette what would it be? Obviously I appreciate you more than likely have no experience of our niche, I'm just curious.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

[BeanstalkIM]

Good question.  I'm not sure exactly how I'd write it as it would depend on how your products are arranged.  If you have pages for each of the different cartridges so you can target terms such as LC980BK independently then I'd probably go with something like:

Buy Brother DCP-197C Ink Cartridges from Domain.com

Of course he structure would differ by printer type as this model doesn't have any searches for phrases including "inkjet" so I'd skip including that.  I also like the word "Buy" because if I'm looking up cartridges that's what I want to do.

Obviously testing is key though.

Hope that helps and best of luck ...

Dave

[ChrisHolgate]

Many thanks Dave.

To be honest I'm thinking about disregarding the 55 limit altogether and just keeping the length sensible and popping the important keywords towards the beginning of the title so it doesn't matter too much if / when it gets truncated.

For example, something like the following for a product listing:

'Canon PGI-520BK Compatible Inkjet Cartridge. Buy PGI-520 Ink at Refresh Cartridges.'

This covers the keywords Canon, Inkjet, Ink, Cartridge, Cartridges and the name of the product twice along with the inclusion of 'Buy' and the Company Name.

I don't think it looks hideously spammy but please do feel free to give me a slap if you think I may be about to make a terrible mistake  

Thanks again.

[BeanstalkIM]

Something in the title you sent triggered a thought and after checking I realized you're dealing with a .co.uk domain.  I have found the .co.uk Google to be far more tolerant of heavy keyword use and even link spam so you're probably in a battle with folks who are indeed keyword stuffing or worse and finding yourself having to do the same just to keep up.

It's a bit of a slippery slope but I will admit that even some recent work I did in the UK required a slightly more heavy handed approach to SEO than I'd typically do.  So while I wouldn't recommend it in the US, the title you're suggesting will probably work well in the UK.

Cheers !

Dave