How Amazon’s New Product Title Policy is Changing SEO Strategies

Amazon is implementing a new product title policy effective January 21, 2025, with the aim of standardizing listings and improving the customer shopping experience. These updates will significantly impact how sellers approach search engine optimization (SEO) on the platform. This article explores the changes and how sellers need to adapt their strategies, moving from keyword stuffing to leveraging external traffic.

Amazon’s New Product Title Policy: What’s Changing?

The new policy introduces significant restrictions on product titles:

• Character Limit: Titles are limited to a maximum of 200 characters, including spaces, for most product categories.
• Special Characters: Special characters such as !, $, ?, _, {, }, ^, ¬, and ¦ are not allowed, unless they are part of a brand name. 
• Word Repetition: Titles may not contain the same word more than twice, with exceptions for prepositions, articles, and conjunctions.

These changes are intended to make product titles clear, concise, and consistent. Amazon has observed that product titles have become too long and contain redundant words that can decrease customer confidence.

The Old SEO Method: Keyword Stuffing and Amazon PPC

Traditionally, many Amazon sellers have relied on keyword stuffing product titles and using Amazon Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to train the algorithm on what keywords to rank for, in addition to all of the other obvious methods like listing optimization. 

• Keyword Stuffing: Sellers would cram as many relevant keywords as possible into the product title, often at the expense of readability, to try to increase search visibility. 
• Amazon PPC: Running Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads was a major strategy for sellers to get their listings in front of more customers and drive sales, also providing Amazon with data about which keywords to rank a listing for.

However, this method often led to unreadable and sometimes confusing product titles. The new policy makes this method of optimization much more difficult and likely less effective.

The New Amazon SEO Method

Due to Amazon’s new product title restrictions, sellers may need to rely more heavily on external traffic to “train” Amazon’s algorithm for ASIN keyword rankings. At PinWheel Performance Marketing, we leverage Amazon Attribution links to direct Pinterest traffic to your Amazon products using a performance-based approach. Following Amazon and Pinterest’s recent data-sharing partnership announcement, Amazon can now access keywords from both Pinterest pin metadata and website metadata. Importantly, Amazon reportedly prioritizes external traffic and clicks significantly more than PPC for determining organic rankings—with some experts suggesting external traffic carries three times the weight of PPC traffic. For products with shortened titles, this means you may need to increase your external traffic efforts to achieve organic rankings for keywords that couldn’t fit within the new title length restrictions.

If you’re interested in exploring these strategies, we invite you to schedule a demo call with our team to discuss your options.