

Proof of how important website titles are for SEO - paraschopra
http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/how-important-website-titles-seo/

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burriko
That exact phrase is also in the first paragraph, the page heading, and in the
url. The conclusion that it's the page title that has caused it to rank so
well doesn't seem accurate. If anything I'd say that it's a combination of the
exact phrase being in all 4 places.

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zx76
I'm also fairly certain there's a recency effect in play as well.

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paraschopra
Probably true. That blog post is #4 right now.

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archon810
This is absolutely due to the freshness of the post. In fact, it’s already at
spot #4 in my results. It is common knowledge that Google pushes up recent
posts and slowly sinks them to where they belong after some time.

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paraschopra
Can't it also be the case that in last 24 hours many more posts/webpages have
come onto the web competing for the same phrase. (Especially since Christmas
is near)

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andybak
Did he turn off personalized search with the pws=0 parameter?

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duck
Great tip, I didn't know about this trick and had always just used incognito
to do this.

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Zakuzaa
It's surprising that such a baseless article is coming from an A/B testing
tool provider.

Your article is talking about correlation, not causation. Where's the 'proof'?

I'd say you're just trying to milk the controversy around John's article.
Nothing wrong in that had you provided an insightful article.

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paraschopra
Correlation happens when two events can occur independently. In this case,
Google would have never ranked the blog post had I not _written_ the blog
post.

But I agree that it is not blog post contains a scientific proof. Sorry if you
thought the title sounded like it did.

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joshklein
It is really frustrating to me that so few rely on their common sense with
this topic. As a single page can only have one title, and it is the clearest
indicator of what the page is about (it is the TITLE), of course it is
important. It is also the main determinant of whether someone will click on
your search result after, of course, rank.

But we're also talking about "onpage SEO" here, which is like 1/1000th of what
determines if you will have a successful website in search engines (and even
less for a successful website, period). You should know the basics, then worry
far more about the quantity and quality of links to your pages... and lots of
other stuff.

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code_duck
It's notable that 'free' and 'free gift' are alleged "stop words", too. I've
seen a lot of confusion about that concept in certain communities; some people
think that merely including "stop words" will cause serious dinging in search
rankings.

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paraschopra
Free or free gift is not stop words. "a", "the", "or" are stop words. And any
way I don't think this is relevant to ranking of the post.

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code_duck
I think we're talking about different concepts, and yes, inclusion of these
words does not appear to have been a factor. What I'm referring to is a belief
held by some that words such as 'free' ae interpreted by google as meaning the
page is lower quality content, spammy in some way, and is this results in
demotion.

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user24
that's not what stop words are. Search on google for a definition.

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unicornporn
Alt title: Proof of how unimportant "SEO experts" are to the web.

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kadavy
I would imagine that the search volume of this exact keyphrase is pretty low,
even this time of year. So, not much competition, and not much benefit for
winning.

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woodywoodruff
This should be really, really obvious stuff for pretty much anyone who reads
HN.

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Samuel_Michon
It's a reaction to a post on Daring Fireball earlier this week:

<http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/title_junk>

