A few weeks ago a client decided they wanted to have their phone number in the title tags of their web pages. Their reasoning, of course, is that they would get more calls from their placement in the search engines. I wasn’t particularly interested in diluting the targeted keyword phrases with a phone number, but as you know the customer is always right…

Well, about two weeks after having the phone number in the title tags Google dropped this site from the rankings on its major keyword phrases. Our client went into panic mode. At the time I wasn’t sure why they had dropped out, but after a lot of research I came to the conclusion that it must be the phone numbers. We put the phone numbers back in the title tags and whoalaa, the site came back into the rankings about a week later.

Ok, take aways. Google wants the most relevant content in their index. A phone number in the title tag does not encourage a user on to the content, it encourages the user on to the phone. I can see why Google doesn’t like this.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 1:20 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.