5 replies to this topic

[seodesire]

I've been pretty indecisive about my newsest projects tagline. Therefore I have ended up changing it numerours times which has changed the title a few times in the process. I'm wondering is this a bad idea to do this on a site for future reference. Thanks.

[Randy]

There's no risk of penalty if that's what you're asking.

The down side is that you may end up temporarily confusing the search engines while they're trying to figure out what the page is about, since they do take the <title> content into account. So if you were changing the title and trying to track rankings you'd probably get some odd and interesting results, depending upon which version they had indexed at the moment you were checking.

No risk of permanent damage though.

[piskie]

Although I have no view nor evidence myself, I have read 'elsewhere' that repeated title tweaking without any change in content can be detrimental in Google SERPs that lasts beyond those changes. Has anyone else come across this?

[Randy]

I've come across the rumor in my travels, yes. And in fact I did attempt to induce some sort of penalty some time back when I'd heard the same thing. I basically set up a little random title changer script on a few dozen pages of a 6 or 7 domains (half testing domains, half not) I control. I had the script swap out to a new title each day, with the swapped titles sometimes not having anything to do with the actual content on the page.

Yes the test pages rankings were affected at times during the test because the <title> content does hold some sway over rankings if other factors are close. However when I shut down the test and went back to the normal content all of the rankings of all of the pages on all of the domains returned to normal.

I just chalked it up to whoever started the rumor mixing up cause and effect.

[Jill]

Although I have no view nor evidence myself, I have read 'elsewhere' that repeated title tweaking without any change in content can be detrimental in Google SERPs that lasts beyond those changes. Has anyone else come across this?

Not tested it, but the whole theory just sounds silly to me.

It's your site, of course you can change the title as much as you want. It's none of Google's business, and I'd be highly surprised if they would penalize for something like that.

Of course, the changes you make will affect things, but beyond that, I just can't believe Google would be that silly.

[Randy]

Yeah, it's never made much sense to me either Jill.

I think where I heard it was one of the first places suggesting you should update page content frequently to show freshness. As if this was somehow important to rankings for every site out there. You know how that goes... Every time someone comes up with a wonderful new theory that's guaranteed to boost rankings they have to also come up with something not to do so they have an easy explanation when it does not work.