Removing forum name from thread titles - Worth it?

[thealpha]

I know this has been brought up, and I even read the vbseo post on how to remove the forum name from each thread title. My question is, why isn't this done here?

A while back I experimented with changing the format of my forum name from:

Blue WidgetUsers Forum to Blue Widget Forum (hoping adding a keyword would be of some use)

Needless to say, my rankings were hit hard for about 30 days; in which I changed it back. I am now to the point where I am considering doing this again, but this time removing the forum name altogether. I have about 90k pages indexed, is this something that is going to hurt more than help? Or is it worth the jump?

[Joe Ward]

You experienced a loss in traffic, or just your indexed page count dropped?

In most situations this would be appropriate for long tail optimization. That is, removing the forum title from each thread title.
What is the Search Long Tail? - vBulletin SEO Forums

The title is a major SEO factor, therefore you want it to represent the page content as much as possible. Having the forum title (especially a long one) on every thread page will slightly skew the meaning of the title for the search engines, and will reduce the relevancy of the actual terms.

Now, of course, if you have bad or nonsense titles, the forum title would actually help add some value. But for titles that are a least somewhat accurately describing the thread, they are (in most cases) best left to stand on their own.

Before doing a change, the best recommendation would probably be to do some analysis on your sources of traffic. If you are ranking and get a high volume of traffic for terms in the forum title, then it could actually be detrimental to your traffic. This is because you might not be "long tail dominated". That is, the major source of your traffic would be from only a small group of keywords, with a short long tail.

You would also want to make sure that the other keyword combinations you are getting ranked for are not simply a combination of the forum title + thread title. In this case, your particular niche might have a high volume of long tail searches that include terms in your title.

Overall, I recommend removing it, and never loading up the forum title with too many terms.

We do keep it in place here. While I would prefer to have it remove here as well, it is usual in branding our site as "vBulletin SEO" which is important for our business, and we do not rely exclusively on search traffic for our success since we are not making money from ads where earnings are directly proportionate to traffic.

[thealpha]

Thanks for the great reply Joe, I think I am going to remove them for the time being.