Hi guys, Say I have an aged domain and a pr 2 - 3, but the page titles are not optimised. If I edit them, will this cause the site to drop out of the index? This site might not be spidered all that often. Just a basic web presence for a small training business. Has anyone had experience editing page titles and not seeing the sites fall out of Google's cache? Thanks in advance for any help.
Changing title/description/content will in somehow reflect on your rankings. It depends how much you will change it.
If I change the title descriptions across a site, how long before the site comes back into the index (assuming it drops out)?
I can't tell. It depends. Lets say that you change something. After that you need to wait gewgle to cache the changes. This may take up to 10 days, some times even more. It depends on the authority of the site. Than if the changes are irrelevant to the content of the site it will take you a lot of time and effort to rank it high. If the changes are relevant to the optimized site, than not too long. Sometimes right after gewgle caches the new title and description.
yeah I know that heavier traffic sites get crawled regularly. is there a way to tell how often a site gets crawled. This site is a very static 'this is our company, this is what we do' type of site.
The sites with good link architecture and backlinks gets crawled regularly. Don't you have statistics to look at?
ike I said, this site was built probably 2 or 3 years ago and is very basic in structure, no backlinks.
Why would it drop out of the index? If Google doesn't crawl it, the title won't be changed. If Google does crawl it, why would it de-index it because the title has changed? I've changed titles many times for some sites as a test, they haven't got de-indexed.
hi koshiro, thanks for the reply, this is just something I am just a little cautious about. I would just hate to lose a site out of the index after changing the page titles. I guess I'll just give it a go!
Pick any decent keyword you can think of and search them at google. Take good notice of how often it appears in the top 20 results (in the title) Then get to your site and do what you've been thinking about. As long as your page titles are relevant to the pages (either by content/backlinks/outbounds/etc) you will be fine. They wont deindex or penalize you unless you are spammy.
Hi topicstarter, Changing your page titles won't hurt your rankings, instead, it can help your rankings. Just make sure, it's not spammy, make it look "human", put it in H1 tags. If changing your title reflects your page URL, make sure you do a proper 404- or 301-redirect.
I don't know if it still happens or if this was coincidental, but I changed the title on one of my sites last year and lost ranking for like 3 weeks. When the site came back in the index, it was in the same position.
It actually can help your rank, but you must be careful of duplicate title tags (you can check it out at Google Webmaster Tool).
that is it ! it took 3 weeks to reindex and not because you did any mistake. and if your rank remained in the same position means you changed the title which was just relevant to your previous title.
Changing your Page Title definately affects Rankings for a given keyword but DOES NOT in any way affect link juice.
if you dont have any backlinks and your titles are not optimized the traffic right now is probably half of what you should be getting! if you optimize your page titles and your page content you will not drop your rankings providing you dont try keyword stuffing, if anything your rankings should improve tenfold especially if you start increasing your relevant anchor text backlinks... hth