Will changing titles and metatags hurt site?

A friend of mine with an established site for her business wants to rank higher for certain phrases. I want to change some of her page's titles and meta tags to match the terms (rather than just be close) - but my question is - what happens to these already existing pages in Google?

Do I screw things up by making minor changes to the title? What about metatags? It would be too redundant to add pages just for these key terms as the content for it is already on existing pages...

 

Short answer is nothing, meaning those pages are still going to be there but with a different title attribute and meta tags.

I suppose what you change them to answers the next question. If you want to pm me a link I will tell you what I think based on what folks are actually searching for etc....

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

We changed the title of one of our page. The page had a pr2 before the change and now has a pr0. The website had a pr4 and now has pr3. So be careful. But if you think that could be a good move for the future, do it anyway. Sometime you have to make a step back before going forward.

 

Thanks - this is the sort of stuff I was worried about. Yeah, it will help for future, but it's obnoxious of them to drop pr for a valid change

 

Changing the title tag will definitely affect your ranking, especially if you put keywords in there that haven't been previously optimized. Keyword competition also plays a big role in any metatag revision. Putting new tags and keywords means starting your linkbuilding activities all over again.

 

changing of title and meta key will affect your ranking.

 

everything depends on how you do it, and what it already ranks for. if you get it right, you pick up other phrases you didnt have before as well, if you get it wrong you lose what you had previously.

this has nothing to do with changing title tags

 

The change in traffic is usual as the previous traffic was based on the past title tags. But if the new title tag is more optimized one in near future you have the chance to get more traffic. After all I don't think the title tag change will affect the PR of a page. That might be some other reason.

 

Has anyone lost position in Google SERPs after changing one or more titles on his/her site? Or someone's site was punished with delay in indexing or so?

 

Burano, all your current backlinks is referring to the old title permalink URL. Changing the title is ok, how about the permalink address? Remember, keywords in title have more weight in SEO purpose and you might have already ranked good for it. Changing it is similar to starting back from zero level.

Maybe, you can try 301 redirection. Pointing all the backlink juice to the new permalink address.

 

He is talking about changing the page title NOT the url.

What you are talking about is a blog where the title may be part of the url depending on it's settings.


have a look in the server logs see what keyword have brought in visitors before and try to keep the most common ones for the page in the title if possible as well as add the new ones.

adding a description meta tag should help if done correctly with both the past keywors and new ones mentiond in the description. Has always worked fine for me on static pages.

 

Changing the <title> will NOT affect your PR. PR of a page has nothing to do with its <title> element.

However, changing your <title> CAN most definitely change your rankings since <title> is the most important on-page SEO element used to determine your rankings at all of the major engines.

So, it depends on what you change your <title> to as to whether it helps or hurts that URLs rankings for a particular keyword phrase.

 

what i would do..

- do it very slowly
- create new pages with onpage optimized and wait for google and other searchengine to index then 301 the old pages
- if i decide to keep the old pages and edit title and metas then change very slowly, it is for sure pages will lose respective serp ranks and it might come back positive later.
- remember mass changes with title and meta will flag you in google.

 

I think yes...it can be hurt on your website...check before you can change the keywords or titles...in most of the cases Google PR will be decreased...so be cautious for that

 

If the company is not happy with the seo results and you know that making changes to the seo/keywords will bring in more traffic then do it!

It will probably downgrade your PR to begin with but you should look at this as a long term strategy... will be worth the effort, just make sure you get it right so it doesn't have to be done again down the road...

 

just a same question here, i changed my title. not a lot but a minute change, does it hurt too?

 

Yes, I changed my title and lost position in the SERPs. I then gave up with trying to optimise my site for a while, mainly because I was just too busy. Now I've changed the title again and I have quite a few top 10/5/3 spots.

You really need to know what you're doing if you're going to change the title, because if the website is currently ranking quite well and the keyword is in the beginning of the title, then getting rid of it or shifting the position of the keyword is very risky. This is based on my own experience of messing around with the title of my website's homepage.

 

Absolutely, changing title, meta tag, meta description, keyword of a webpage will effect the traffic, PR and other things related to SEO.

 

I was change my page title that usually have a page 1 at some google keyword result. But after i changed, the page is disappear from the result.

 

I initially thought just creating new pages would be easier, but I'm also afraid that would flag the site in Google because the pages would so obviously be for SEO purposes.

Her site is currently optimized for the wrong keywords - they are very close though to the correct ones, but the phrasing is off.

This is just an example, but something like this:
her site's metatags are 'shipping boxes, moving box, moving services'...when the keywords that actually get MORE searches are 'boxes for shipping, services for moving'...

If I ADD those terms to the metatags and leave the old ones too - couldn't that be considered keyword stuffing?

*Also, I should add that is only one aspect of the problem. There are also a few competitive keywords she needs to be ranking for that are not yet implemented in title, metatags, or content at all. But again - new pages would be redundant because it's just talking about the same service.

Or what if I just left the metatags and titles as is...and tweaked the actual content? Would that help?

Thanks everyone -- seems to be different thoughts and experiences...but I'll feel better about making more informed choices now once I figure out the best strategy.