A SEO advice for Blogger: Remove the blog title from the post title

This topic has been covered many times on the Internet, but bloggers don't to pay much attention to it. So, in this article, I am bringing some light to this matter (AGAIN), even if my post is labeled by Google as “duplicate content”.

If you create a new blog in Blogger,  this is what you should expect for the pages of your baby blog:
  1. Blog Home Page Title: corresponds to your blog title. For example: the home page title of this blog is “Yanniel's notes”.
  2. Post Page Title:  is formed by concatenating your blog title, a colon-space (“: ”) and your current post title. For example: the page title for this post would have been by default “Yanniel's notes: A SEO advice for Blogger: Remove the blog title from the post title”.
The pattern followed in point number 2 is really bad from the SEO point of view. The page title is one of the most (if not the most)  important aspects for Search Engine Optimization; which is why, replicating the blog title on each post title is not wise.

That  behavior leads Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines to depreciate your post entries, because they find “duplicate content” in all the titles of your blog pages.

I really don't see any benefit in prefixing each post title with the blog title.

A way to change this situation is to remove the blog title from the title of each post. To achieve this follow the steps below:
  1. Open your Blog Template HTML editor, available thought Menu->Template -> Edit HTML.
  2. Find the string <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
  3. Replace it with:
        <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"
    '>
          <title><data:blog.title/></title>
        <b:else/>
          <title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
        </b:if>
  4. Click the Save Template button. Done!
Notice that my post title is no longer: “Yanniel's notes: A SEO advice for Blogger: Remove the blog title from the post title".

The strikethrough part was removed!

Hope this helps!

    16 comments:

    1. Very cool!! Keep up the good work. Just implemented it on my blog and it works just fine.

      ReplyDelete
    2. Thank
      but its dont work
      it say :

      Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly.
      XML error message: The value of attribute "cond" associated with an element type "null" must not contain the '<' character.

      http://french-download.blogspot.com/

      ReplyDelete
    3. Hi TONNT,

      Thanks for your feedback. I will take a closer look at the issue you are having and if I find any clarity, I will write it down ASAP.

      Just one more thing: this solution DOES work. This very blog (www.yanniel.info) is proof of it.

      Hugs,

      ReplyDelete
    4. YOU were right TONNT. There was one single-quote missing just after ... == "index" . I fixed that in the article.

      Sorry for the mistake and thank you so much for the feedback.

      Does it work for you now? Let me know the outcome, please!

      ReplyDelete
    5. That is the problem of wordpress and eblogger. The developers at default does not place in mind seo elements. You have to do all the work.

      seo outsourcing

      ReplyDelete
    6. This did not work for me. I followed the instructions here. When I share a blog post on facebook, it still shows the site's title. What to do?

      ReplyDelete
    7. I really don’t understand what Facebook has to do with his post. Could you clarify, please? I will try to help you.

      ReplyDelete
    8. Well, it worked a treat for me. Thanks, Yanniel.

      I think what jims meant was that when he shares a post from Blogger onto Facebook, it doesn't work. I haven't tried that yet myself, but if I encounter any bugs, I'll be sure to come back and let you know the details.

      If you don't hear from me again, consider your work completed!

      ReplyDelete
    9. how long it will take to make changes in google search

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. Hard to say for sure, but I think within a month your changes should be visible in Google's SERP.

        Delete
    10. Thanks Yanniel. It worked for me too..check it out at the below link:

      www.digitalsensus.com

      ReplyDelete
    11. Thanks! Worked great on my account movieloversreviews.blogspot.com. :)

      ReplyDelete
    12. Harold is right, not all web 2.0 blog sites can be managed or can be fully optimized. There are default settings that we can manipulate that would most likely be suitable for paid sites. Surely, web 2.0 web developer generates those limitation to set a standard for every blog creation.

      ReplyDelete
    13. I followed the instructions but when I do a search on Google, my blog title still appears first?

      ReplyDelete