Help Me Reclaim My Page Title from Distilled!

On Monday, my post entitled “How Distilled Stole My Page Title” went around the Twittersphere. It was interesting to see the feedback and there were a lot of comments from a lot of people I respect. Read the comments here.

Now I run into an issue. I’ve never confronted something like this before, and I want to test in order to see what will cause the page title to change back in Google.

I need your help testing

How should I proceed with the testing? The first test is already in place. I unapproved the comments that Jen from SEOmoz thinks may have been contributing:

This test has been in place for 24 hours. It does not seem that Google has cached the page yet, but according to @rosshudgens:

The title has changed a bit. You can see that there is now a new “- The” in the title:

Compare to before:

I am going to run this test until tomorrow morning. Now the question becomes “What do I test next?”

Take the poll and help me out!

[poll id=”2″]

If you select “Other”, please tell me in the comments what you suggest.

Thanks everyone! I’ll be publishing my findings once all this is done!

9 thoughts on “Help Me Reclaim My Page Title from Distilled!

  1. There are so many things to test. One is the NOODP/NOYDIR, but another is seeing if you can change the title based on anchor text. I’d need to be kind of off beat to see if it works. There are so many places to take this. Good luck!

    1. Yes, I think NOODP/NOYDIR is last resort, but then again I don’t know too much about it. Hence why I’m crowdsourcing for ideas 🙂

  2. John – do not ask Distilled to change the anchor text! That’s like giving up 🙂 Instead, do the other test we talked about and see if it tops their high domain authority link…

    Curious about the use of NOODP and NOYDIR – doesn’t that just tell search engine to ignore Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo Directory anchor text?? What does that have to do with this?

    1. Tom –

      Thanks for your comment! Let’s see what the crowds think (come on people, I need more votes!) and I’ll collaborate with you before I make any changes.

      In regards to NOODP/NOYDIR, you’re right, they are directives for Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory, respectively. I wonder if having these in place, however, send a signal to GOOG that I don’t want them changing my page title at all.

      Thoughts?

  3. Hey John,

    I’d start the reclaim by getting some new links with the correct anchor text –

    In second (and because this test intersts me) I would launch a Retweet campaign of the page with the proper title in the tweet.

    1. Bonjour Julien –

      Thanks for the comment! That’s what the poll told me to do as well. Fancy giving me a link with the correct anchor text? Do you think I should also get links to the homepage using my name? Or should that be a separate test?

  4. I can give you 3 links already… but I guess that with a few tweets / mails with other guys we should be able to get a good number quite quickly – Can check with Florian, he’d be interested in this test for example

    1. Great, thanks. I think at this point, I’m going to go with the links I have already gotten. It won’t take many, because there are not a ton of links to my site at this point. If it doesn’t work, I have some other tricks up my sleeve!

  5. Pingback: Distilled Lost My Page Title and Google Plays Jokes

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