Hi all, I've got a dilemma... I use wordpress as my CMS (as many do) and a while back I decided to leave my titles displaying with the double arrow » in front... My logic was that it would help draw the searcher's eye while at the same time making my page titles slightly different than my header tags, both of these are good. see it here My concern is with social bookmarking sites like delicious and stumble upon... they also insert these double arrows and I'm afraid that if some people remove them and some people don't then my "votes" won't be as well concentrated. Is this a valid concern? Is this even a valid reason for making a global change and risking any SEO advantages I have (not to mention waiting for re-indexing)? I'm thinking it's not but would appreciate advice from someone who has had a similar problem. Pete.
Generally speaking when re-focussing the page naming conventions we use the htaccess to 301 redirect from the old page names to the new conrresponding ones. This ensures you don't lose any Search Love you may already be getting.
When I had to change my naming convention it onyl affected my SERPs for what I would consider as an insignificanlty small period. 301 re-direct was not an option due to the large number of pages with limited time. So what I'm saying is the best method is 301 redirect. ButI personally would not worry if you do not have the time to do so. Within two weeks my SERPs were back to normal.
I don't see how this matters, the URL isn't changing, just the title. I'd change the titles and you really don't have to worry about backlinks.
It's only the title that I'm looking to change, the URLs will not change so there is no need to 301. My concerns are mostly with the impact it might have on my click through from the SERPs pages. I'm also concerned that by making the title and header tags identical my pages will seem over-optimized and I might lose a bit of traffic. There's only one way to find out though so unless someone has experience that would show this to be a bad idea I guess I'll just have to take the plunge. Thanks for your input so far.