Does your company name in an article title damage Search Engine relevance

Question

I've been wondering about this for a while but never come across a solid answer.

Many websites include their name in all the title tags of their articles. This is often apparent in word-press blogs etc.

eg: Tsunami hits Japan and leaves thousands homeless | My Website Name

The issue I have is that Search engines strip the stop words out of this sentence to leave the words in which it compares to the body text.

So if I want my article to rank well and be relevant, in this case about the terrible Tsunami that has recently struck Japan what is to STOP the MY WEBSITE NAME section of the title de-valuing the relevance of the article.

Am I over-worrying? Or should I take this in to consideration?

Thanks for advice in advance.

Answer 1

Who says they are stop words or are stripped out by search engines? I know none of the search engines have and I haven't seen anyone offering real evidence that this is the case. Sounds like of speculation being thrown around like fact to me.

You have to remember there is more to life then the search engines. Users see page title's, too, and they are the default text used when a page is bookmarked. It is a no-brainer to want your website name in that text for those reasons. And if you look around you'll see that having the name of the website in the title is an extremely common practice and no one seems to be suffering for it.

Don't worry about. Do the smart thing and keep it in the title.

Answer 2

I'd say don't worry about it.

The two most important factors when it comes to the search engine ranking of your site are:

1. Having relevant content on your site.
2. Having reputable sites link to your site.

Focus on those two factors, and you'll be sure to go up in the rankings. If you neglect those two things, then nothing else you do will matter.