My blog is Google-friendly That is, it ranks pretty well for whatever I tend to post about. I get about 800 people a day coming here via Google (compared to just 10-20 people a day from other blogs!), and I'm always keeping an eye on it. Four weeks ago it was only about 400 people a day. What changed over the month?

I removed "PeterCooper.co.uk: " from the prefix of all my individual post page titles.

This is the biggest thing that has affected my Google traffic over the last month. I was reading WebMasterWorld several months ago and someone suggested using <title> prefixes was a bad idea. I didn't bother to look into it any further till a month ago, and eventually decided to give it a go. Within a week, Google had reindexed almost everything and my positions were slightly improved, along with my traffic. The traffic increase is both partly due to slightly better rankings, but mostly because Google's searchers can get a better idea of what the page is about as they see more of the post title in the search result.

So, if you're using a prefix on your <title> tags for your posts.. don't. Add your site name as a suffix if you need to.

Technorati Tags: blogging, google, seo