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Tackling 8,000 Title Tag Rewrites: A Case Study


Guest Dr. Peter J. Meyers

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Guest Dr. Peter J. Meyers
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I recently dug into over 50,000 title tags to understand the impact of Google’s rewrite update. As an SEO, this naturally got me wondering how the update impacted Moz, specifically. So, this post will be a more focused examination of a site I have deep familiarity with, including three case studies where we managed to fix bad rewrites.

 

As an author, I take titles pretty personally. Imagine if you wrote this masterpiece:

 

8000-rewrites-0a.png?w=660&auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1631756578&s=06cf195a47275c91485824164ccbffcc

 

… and then you ended up with a Google result that looked like this:

 

8000-rewrites-0b.png?w=660&auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1631756583&s=2c0258a23546584aa14e43512b58e427

 

Sure, Google didn’t do anything wrong here, and it’s not their fault that there’s an upper limit on what they can display, but it still feels like something was lost. It’s one thing to do a study across a neutral data set, but it’s quite another when you’re trying to understand the impact on your own site, including articles you spent hours, days, or weeks writing.

 

Moz rewrites by the numbers

 

 

I’m not going to dig deep into the methodology, but I collected the full set of ranking keywords from Moz’s Keyword Explorer (data is from late August) and scraped the relevant URLs to pull the current

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