Double Title Tags

[Troshi]

Almost two weeks ago I noticed a WordPress website had double <title> tags on every page. The WordPress theme had a built in echo statement for the title as well as the title tag outputted from the wp_head().

As soon as I noticed this, I removed the theme's hard-coded (and duplicate) title tag (on the 5th or 6th). Within 2 days almost all rankings plummeted. I wasn't surprised, but after waiting 2 weeks the rankings don't seem to be dancing, they are only decreasing further.

It is possible the drop in rankings was caused by another factor that just so happened to impact when I made the change, but pretty unlikely as its a 100% white hat site with a strong organic link profile.

Any thoughts?

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Random fact: Double title tags used to be a trick from way back, to get scrolling titles.

About OP: Maybe you stumbled onto a bug here, where the invalid title somehow avoided a filter.

I was just testing a site of mine where the home page has been filtered out for its main kw. The title is over optimized for that kw. Perhaps you are facing something similar.

 

[Troshi]

Thanks for the reply, @bartosimpsonio

Maybe you stumbled onto a bug here, where the invalid title somehow avoided a filter.

Neither title tag was invalid, each page of the site was simply outputting two identical <title>Unique Post Title</title>, one above all the meta/social meta details and a duplicate after. Unless, by invalid you meant invalid W3C (in which case ignore this comment lol).

I was just testing a site of mine where the home page has been filtered out for its main kw. The title is over optimized for that kw. Perhaps you are facing something similar.

This site has almost 1k unique indexed posts and pages, plus all the category archives. There has been a site-wide drop in rankings (not just money keyword pages), so my hunch is that it isn't an over-optimization issue because every page has dropped.

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Edit: Would you ride out the change for another week+, or try converting back to the previous theme template with the double titles?

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Edit: Would you ride out the change for another week+, or try converting back to the previous theme template with the double titles?

For some reason I thought the title was the only thing you changed. If you did change the whole theme, then that is likely it. It's likely more about the linking structure in the new theme. Themes can and do kill SEO.

 

[Troshi]

For some reason I thought the title was the only thing you changed. If you did change the whole theme, then that is likely it. It's likely more about the linking structure in the new theme. Themes can and do kill SEO.

Nah, I confused you again.. I didn't change to a completely new theme, I just deleted the snippet from the template that echoed the <title> a second time. By restoring the theme, I really just meant restoring the theme page/post template from 2 weeks ago instead of adding the 1 or 2 lines of code.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Nah, I confused you again.. I didn't change to a completely new theme, I just deleted the snippet from the template that echoed the <title> a second time. By restoring the theme, I really just meant restoring the theme page/post template from 2 weeks ago instead of adding the 1 or 2 lines of code.

Google likely ignores double titles (one of their disinformation spouts said it years ago). Meaning your title is probably hurting more than it is helping, since being ignored it ranked higher.

 

[LinkHeros]

If that is the only thing that you changed, I would change it back and see if your rankings improve.