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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.

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.

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

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

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.

Sorry missed this, it's ok to close now. Thanks a lot.

http://www.google.com/ Tribute to Steve Jobs on the homepage of Google.

I couldn't help but check to see whether it was do follow.

RIP Steve Jobs, a true visionary and pioneer.

Thanks a lot guys still new to the whole SEOMoz Q&A!

can Google see the responses too?

Can somebody please do me a fav and remove the url, pls

Hey Ryan. Some good points.

I believe the page was number 1. But I wasn't monitoring it much for a while, until I noticed it had disappeared.

I actually removed the instance of "nokia n8 themes" on the page, because of the concern of too many instances on the page. But you're right, it should likely appear once.

Once the rank disappeared. The top 10 Nokia N8 Themes page, then started to rank on page 2.

The search on the site, only searches keywords, rather than brands or models etc.

Just did a quick google site search for the term and it's just started to show the correct page, first. But searching the term alone, it's still a gonna. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=nokia+n8+themes+site:[redacted by staff] &ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Then search Nokia n8 Themes [redacted] and the correct page ranks. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=nokia+n8+themes+site:[redacted by staff]&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&source=hp&q=nokia+n8+themes+tehkseven&pbx=1&oq=nokia+n8+themes+[redacted]&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=330687l331806l0l331849l9l3l0l0l0l0l178l321l0.2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=5b3846bb372396b3&biw=1210&bih=561

So it appears to effect only the direct match "nokia n8 themes". Which is interesting.

Thanks for the responses. I am actually half expecting the page to come back, now that I've removed some of the instances of the KW and diluted the instances of the anchors etc.

That's true Ryan I guess it is coding related really.

Issues like this are a real pain in the ass. And most people don't even check WMT to realise the issues exist. TBH, I don't check as often as I should.