How would changing every title tag on your site at once affect SEO?

[cparedes]

We are moving our website to a new CMS, and working with a vendor who would like to change the title tags from the current format to a breadcrumb structure. Our fear is that this may negatively impact the current optimization efforts in place. Our current title tags are a mixed bag of good, bad and neutral, but some have been optimized for best practices. Does anyone have any insight on the effect we would see if everything were changed at once, or any suggestions on how we could test this before we launch the "new" site?

Thanks!

[ChrisAshton]

Updating them all at once isn't inherently bad, it's more about the quality of the updated ones that may see a negative impact.

When you say a breadcrumb structure, I immediately think of something like this: "Letterboxes - Steel - Small | Site Name" - is that what they're looking to move to? Handcrafted ones can be made far more compelling and often less spammy but it depends on the context of your site really and how many pages you're talking about.

Regardless of the number of pages, you should at least be writing them manually for the key landing pages - remember, the main reason for a page title is to attract that click from the right type of user in the SERPs.

If you'd like to share some examples of the proposed ones I can probably be much more helpful

[erickcalderon]

Hi Cesar,

I would think that changing it all at once may have both positive and negative effects for you based on what your current status is as far as the SERPS go. Use MOZ on page grader https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader to check to see how your pages rank for the keywords you are targeting on each page. You can also check your rankings by running a report in MOZ. Then you can see where you stand. Next try switching a few, getting re indexed, check your SERPS and run the reports again.

But you may want to have your vendor try something else.

I would caution against a breadcrumb structure because it may not really help you. I am not familiar with your site, but in general Title tags can be used for both SEO and to increase click-through. What I mean is that you need the TITLE to look good in the SERPS so that people will click on them and go to your site. The same goes for the META Description, it is not used for SEO but it can be a great way to increase click-through by presenting a very short description of what the user will find on the page if they click your link.

You may be better off researching what it is you want these pages to rank for and then creatively optimize for that in your titles, descriptions, and all other on page content.

Hope that helps!
Erick

[cparedes]

Thanks Chris and Erick,

You both touch on something that we are concerned about... Is moving to a breadcrumb structure going to make the tags too generic and negatively impact the ones we have optimized to be unique and attention grabbing? (And yes, Chris, that is a good example of the structure it would become)

On one hand, we have some title tags that were written a few years ago when keyword stuffing was encouraged. Obviously these need to be changed, so in this case we would consider it a positive to move to a breadcrumb structure to at least wipe any negative effects of keyword stuffing, even if the result isn't the most relevant.

On the other hand, we have gone through and edited the title tags of some pages so they are optimized for length, keyword placement, etc. and these are the ones we don't want to lose.

Our biggest concern, however, is the ones we don't know about. We are under a bit of a time crunch at this point, and the website has over 1,500 pages of content. Going through each title tag and assessing it's value will be a fairly time-consuming process unless there are tools that I'm unaware of.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[ChrisAshton]

No problem Cesar.

With 1500 pages, the most time-efficient thing to do right now is to keep and/or write your own for the most important landing pages and use a different template format for the others.

It's not reasonable to go writing 1500 page titles and meta descriptions right now but for at least your primary landing pages (if it's ecommerce then your category and subcategory pages), you should be writing them manually.

As for the other pages, using a templated approach is your best bet for the time being but the breadcrumb style will still give you quite a lot of duplication which is a bit of a worry. If you have 200 products under a single subcategory, that's 202 pages that all have the same keyword(s) in the title:

Category
     Category - Subcategory
     Category - Subcategory - Product 1
     Category - Subcategory - Product 2
     Category - Subcategory - Product 3
etc

A better-templated approach for an ecommerce site is to use basic product info and your brand as the page title.

For example, _iPhone 6s Replacement Screen - VX902 | FoneScreenz _

In this example it includes the name of the product on that page, and a product code which would both be variables, as well as the business name (FYI the product code and business are fabricated). This covers users searching by either product name or the specific code and is descriptive enough that it will do just fine.

Basically, the template would look something like:

[Product Name] - [Product Code] | Business Name

[cparedes]

Thanks for your input everyone!