If you use the All in One SEO plugin for your WordPress blogs, the results of a little test I did this past week might be of interest to you.
Let me explain the theory, then my little test, then the results…SEO guru Jerry West pointed out in a post that I was reading that when Google is looking for duplicate content ON YOUR SITE (not external duplicate content which we should have cleared up by now) it’s hard for them to exactly compare, sentence by sentence the total text on two separate pages, so a big factor in influencing their search for duplicate content is similar page titles on your site… that is.. the title that appears at the top of your browser bar or, what goes in the Title Tag of each individual page.
Now…
If you’re a blogger with WordPress, you SHOULD be using a plugin like All in One WordPress SEO to pretty up your page and post titles, meta descriptions and keyword tags, not to mention beat duplicate content on your category and archive pages.
The thing is, the default setting when you install All in One SEO is for the the title of all your blog posts and blog pages to show up as below…
Notice that “BLOG TITLE” is inserted into the title tag of every page and post. If you have a long blog title, like I do for this blog, it can mean that the majority of the words in your title tag can be THE SAME on every title tag of every page (post) on your site, resulting in what Google might more easily because of this, judge as a page of duplicate content.
For example if I happened to write 2 posts called
Opportunity Hopping Sucks
and
Free Traffic Rules
The titles on these two blog posts would be:
Opportunity Hopping Sucks – Andrew Hansen Dot Name – Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Free Traffic
Free Traffic Rules – Andrew Hansen Dot Name – Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Free Traffic
See how similar those look?? Even to a human eye not a computer algorithm, that could be mistaken for duplicate content.
So what about my test?
What I did was simple.
I’d had a couple of sites that’d been floating round the front page in the SERPS for a particular term. I tried changing the post and page titles to remove the BLOG TITLE from every post and page. It looked as below:
What was clear was that on both pages (different sites) I made the test on, their rankings grew by at least 3 places on page one, basically as soon as Google recrawled and reindexed the page. This is a small and definitely not comprehensive enough test, but it makes alot of sense why it happened and would be proven to happen systematically as a result of G’s algorithm.
FURTHER THAN improving the rankings by eliminating what could be viewed as duplicate content, this tweak has another clear benefit.
When your blog title appears on the title of every page and post, that title appears in the search rankings as the title of your listing! It makes for a very unclickable title, almost always resulting in elipses (…) at the end of the listing title, which is proven to decrease CTR on your listing.
Making this tweak ensures your blog posts titles and hence listing titles are clean and more often elipses free… something short and to the point that a real person can click on!
The accumulated effect of Google viewing your site more favorably as my test indicates AND increasing the click through rate of EVERY POST and page that you have indexed in the search engines makes this a SIGNIFICANT change and one that you should DEFINITELY make if you use WordPress and All in One SEO.
We’ve changed it to be the default setting for all blogs created with Firepow and I recommend you do the same.
To your success!
Hi Andrew, thanks for the tips. I’m using All In One SEo for my blogs as well and never even considered tweaking those options.
Quick question though, how come you haven’t changed it for this blog? I can still see your blog title for each of your post.
Oh geez, thanks for the heads up Eric!
I was playing round with them so I could take the screenshots for this blogpost and forgot to change it back to the right config! 🙂
Fixed it up now, thanks again.
Andrew
P.S. Just a sidenote, this blog isn’t one of the ones I ran the test on 🙂
Thanks for that Andrew. I had suspected that all along. I have changed all of my blogs!
Bob
This is very interesting. I had never thought about if the default all in one SEO settings were properly setup for google. Now I guess I need to go and make some changes and try it out.
Hi Andrew! I’ve actually been aware for some time of this information, but there was never any concrete explanation why it should be done (“It’s better” is what I’ve always heard – from three different sources), and so, for some websites I adopted it, for others, I didn’t. When there’s no explanation “Better” just doesn’t cut it. Your explanation is the only one that makes a compelling case as to why this should be done. So thanks! Going to change my blog now.
Andrew,
I never miss a post of yours. You are responsible for my full time income online. Everything you write is gold…as I have said many times before. Thank You.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for sharing this.
I knew about the tweak but only applied to the ‘post & page title’ format. It didn’t cross my mind to test it out for the settings. You bet I’ll be changing these settings on all my blogs.
When it comes to SEO, you can never know too much, and just when you think you do, you learn something shockingly new. That’s the reason why I stay subscribed to newsletters like yours.
God bless.
-Paul
Thanks for going in first. It had been meaning to test that myself, saved me the hassle!
Great piece. Somtimes when I look at my posts with long titles, they look ugly so by using this little trick I can make them look nice and pretty. Thank you Andy.
yes, my understanding was that it is bad to have your website name alongside the article title when listed on Google’s serps, however AIO comes preconfigured like that so i left mine unaltered because AIO are the experts! right! Thats why we install the plugin in the first place! LOL.
I have been using All in SEO plugin for more than 2 years. But now I’m using Headspace plugin which is lot more powerful and has plenty of other features than Allinone SEO!
Great post Andrew! I keep hearing about the duplicate content problem but the resolutions are always vague and seldom have good concrete ways to solve the problem. Thank you (and Jerry West) for the info.
As I check my ranking on my main keywords on a regular basis, it will be interesting to see if this will make a difference. I reckon it’s a moot point, havong your blog name in the title or not.
Michael
Very cool, Andrew! I will make the change immediately and track my results. -Norene
Hmmm. As a programmer I tend to doubt your conclusions. Yes, to the human eye it might be mistaken for duplicate content. By a robot (program) – very doubtful. Especially since the non-duplicated characters are at the beginning of the string. I might buy your premise if the duplicates were at the end of the string, since in some cases only a substring of the first ‘x’ characters might be used just for the sake of speedy comparisons.
The simple (and likely) algorithm to determine if something is the same or not would be to strip all blanks, punctuation and special characters from a string, and then convert everything to the same case. Once that is done, the two strings would be compared to each other. In boolean logic, they would be not equal. Using fuzzier algorithms, there would be a percentage of difference calculated. Even a .001% different would still be a difference, and in your example your differences are close to 25%.
So, what could account for the difference in ranking then? Using Occam’s razor as a guide, I would say the most obvious difference is the length of the phrase. The new phrase – without the title – is much, much (75%) shorter. Perhaps Google just likes shorter phrases. You already revealed a possible reason why – the longer phrase has to be truncated in the search results, which lessens the web user’s experience (an issue Google constantly harps about).
Another possibility is that Googlebots might have a negative reaction toward “redundancy”. After all, the same phrase repeated over and over (ad nauseum) on a website chews up precious processing time and disk space. Not quite duplicate content, not quite keyword spam either – just annoying redundant data. Perhaps Google just rewards those that make its life easier.
Disclaimer: After writing all this, I have to admit I have no clue what really goes on in the mind of Google, and I may be completely and totally wrong (it’s happened many times before :)). Programmers tend to thing along the same lines, so technically I’m probably close to the truth. But, when marketing, management, and others all start influencing what a programmer does – as IBM likes to state in their technical manuals – “unpredictable results may occur”. 🙂
P.S. – I start out with All-In-One, then I switched to Headspace, then I switched back. Headspace, although feature-rich and super-cool in concept, has never been as stable as All-In-One. (I am getting annoyed with having to “switch” AIO on every time there’s a new release however).
Is it necessary to have both headspace and all-In-one plugins?
Nope, just one or the other 🙂
Andrew
Thanks for this great tip! I’ve started at those settings before wondering if I should change them. In the end, I just left them as is because I didn’t know. I will definitely do my own test and see what happen on some sites of mine that have a lot of posts.
Hey Andrew,
Nice and thanks for the awesome tips.
Have always suspected about this but never had the chance to test it out. Since you’ve done the test and I respect and trust you very much, I’ve went ahead and changed the All in one SEO settings like you’ve mentioned above.
I should be expecting some search engine ranking improvements 🙂
Thanks once again!
Welly Mulia
I didn’t know what to make of your post at first but I do agree with the CTR argument. And it is silly to redundantly include the blog title in with the post title and the page title, etc.
Andrew,
That’s great advice, and a very logical justification for doing it. I think the All in One SEO plugin is a great one, and I figured it was best to leave it with pretty much the default settings, since it seemed the developers might know better than me when it came to SEO.
It seems it pays to pay closer attention to the defaults.
JR
Dude, awesome post!
I’ve thought about this issue before, but never from a duplicate content perspective. I’ve went and changed this on most of my blogs and I’m really curious if this will affect rankings and/or traffic on my smaller blogs.
Thanks man, it’s always a pleasure reading your blog posts!
Cheers,
Josip B.
I just updated two of my blogs with your recommendation. It’ll be interested to see what happens.
By the way, what’s your opinion on the use of the “Use noindex for Tag Archives” and “Use noindex for Categories” options in All-in-One?
Thanks.
Thanks Andrew, you advice is always very helpful. I have changed all my blogs.
Wendy
PS This also affects those using Platinum SEO
Well done for testing. Fun isn’t it?
Have you tried Platinum SEO ?
No I haven’t, got a link?
Andrew
I tried this trick almost two months ago when I was targeting a particular keyword phrase. In less than 24 hours I shot up to the no 3 spot on the first page of Google. 48 hours later, I was flung off the first 50 pages. LMAO. I guess they immediately detected something was wrong.
As at today I’m shuffling btw the first two google SERPs for this particular keyword phrase. Creating quality backlinks have helped a lot.
Yes,this also happened to me.My site previously was on the first page,but I checked again after around 24 hours,my site disappeared from the first page…
Should I change back to the original setting?Please advice.
@nick – Changing back usually reverts things, however, if there was a recent algo tweak, it may not jump back the way it did.
Far too often, with SO much stuff going on, we are willing to take an ALL IN ONE SEO pack and just take the DEFAULT settings without much thought (that we may even be hurting outselves).
So this is ONE incredibly huge insight on your part Andrew and reaching out to let others know and shows your dedication to improving our lives one tweak at a time.
It’s these LITTLE tweaks that make a huge impact on an overall portfolio of sites that amounts to really BIG over all changes and these are the kind of insights I look to find whenever I go out to attend a live event.
Keep the insights flowin… – Jim
Cheers Jim! We’ll have this rolling on all your Firepow blogs, no doubt about that 🙂
Andrew
Thanks Andrew that’s very interesting. I gotta try this!
Well, I took it off just the pages, posts, and categories on one of my blogs and now I am at #6 instead of #13! A coincidence? Who knows but I like it! Just changed it on other sites to see what happens.
That is maaaad cool Sara, good job! Let me know what happens with the other site!
Andrew
good post, I use the plugin but I guess it never dawned on me to switch up the settings
Andrew, Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I have been using all-in-one seo for all my blogs and have never bothered changing anything in the way of settings – I suppose if someone creates a seo plugin, one would presume that they have set it on the optimum settings for the purpose that it was created for.
Everything you have said makes perfect sense. I agree with one of your other commenters that any software will not see 2 post names as duplicates, but the human eye could easily see this and mistake it for duplicate content. However, that still doesn’t change the fact that there is value in what you have found.
Thanks again,
Barry
Since I don’t see any other comments re problems with this, it must be techno-idiot me. I changed my All in One SEO date format from the full date to just the month and year, and the result was clicks from Google producing 404s.
Any thoughts? This sounds like a sensible tweak that I’d like to implement if I can get it right.
Really interesting. I’ll check this as well.
Thank you for the trick.
Franck
Interesting head’s up! I’ll do this right now!
I’m no techie by a long shot but it would seem that you would need %blog_title% somewhere in there.
Thanks a lot.
I have no idea on how to go about with this All in One SEO pack. But you have made a very valuable revelation. I am thankful to you for making such nice instruction that could be used in my blogs too. I am going to follow your steps very religiously.
Thank you.
I’m interested to know if any of you have any results from making the changes. Wondering if you all experienced improvements when changing the settings. Wanted to know before we make the change. Thanks! 🙂
I am also wondering if anyone else has a case study. Before & After. Also, what kind of this has on pages vs. posts… Any thoughts?
Hi, Kevin Stacey here..
First off, this post is extremely thorough! I don’t see too many bloggers going into detail like you have…that’s the mark of a blogger who knows their SEO plugin. For optimization, free plugins like All in One SEO Pack are really great as it lays down the basic SEO foundation for a WordPress site, but every blog is different and nothing works best for everyone.
I always suggest looking at a side-by-side comparison of the best seo plugins for WordPress in order to make an informed decision of what the best plugin is for that blogger and their website’s specific needs.
Here’s my most recent write-up on the subject:
SEO Pressor vs Easy WP SEO vs Scribe SEO
http://www.bestseopluginforwordpress.com/wordpress-seo/the-best-seo-plugin-for-wordpress/
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Great article btw…I’ll be referencing this post on my main blog.
Hi Andrew! Thank you so much for this wonderful post. I am helping a client optimize his WordPress blogs for SEO and I installed the Aio SEO. However, I had a nagging feeling that I should be doing something more than just putting in the title, description and meta tags. Thank goodness I followed my gut and did my research. Will be subscribing to your rss/newsletter.
Thanks!
Hi Andrew! I just stumbled on your post after searching for quite a long time. That was the much needed information for me. I just want to ask, what happens to the index pages after I apply this. Do they get de-indexed and then will re-index again. And how much time it will take for them to re-index. I was curious about will there be any crawl issues.