Good ranking, but need to change Page title - How will this effect my ranking ?

[DJDave]

Hi all,

I have a site which is about a year old and has some good ranking for relevant keywords.

However, the focus of the company is shifting a little and I really want to reflect this on the home by changing the page title and a fair bit of the page text. (the site can be found HERE)

Is changing the page title likely to severely damage my ranking for existing keywords? I could set up a new page for the new products and services, but would rather use the home page as this is the ‘portal’ to the rest of the site and really defines what the site is about.

Any advise much appreciated.

-----------------------------
Cheers, Chris

[zurk]

I believe it will affect your rankings. It may decrease or even increase.

[johnafrankllin]

It depends what the changes in the title you are going to do?
1: If you are changing the title completely along with the content of the page, next time the spiders will find a different page than what it was having in past and will change the complete index of your website.
Result: your site disappear from SERPs for some time for present keywords.
2: If you are just introducing 1 or 2 keywords in existing title and putting some more text on the page to justify those keywords, the spiders will find some more than what the site was having in past.
Result: No or very minor affect on ranking for previous keywords. But the newly introduced keywords will take time to show in SERPs. You will have to build links for those keywords.

[thinkfast]

Originally Posted by DJDave

Hi all,

I have a site which is about a year old and has some good ranking for relevant keywords.

However, the focus of the company is shifting a little and I really want to reflect this on the home by changing the page title and a fair bit of the page text. (the site can be found HERE)

Is changing the page title likely to severely damage my ranking for existing keywords? I could set up a new page for the new products and services, but would rather use the home page as this is the ‘portal’ to the rest of the site and really defines what the site is about.

Any advise much appreciated.

-----------------------------
Cheers, Chris

It will effect 100+ % your site ranking because every changes read by SE boat and if its more suitable for your site than past title then you get your rank position in positive otherwise it will be negative.

Try to make a little changes with your previous title if you think you can lose with new keywords because its completely depend on your marketing and keyword competition.


Thanks

[KingPin]

I don't agree with some of the statements above, however, changing your title element will have an impact on your rankings.

It's a 50/50 split as it depends on what you intend on doing.

A few things come into play like keyword prominence etc etc but ultimately, make sure you have content which reflects in the title element.

The experiments I have carried out have been varied. On a few sites I have changed the title and my site has jumped in the rankings but on the flip side I have seen sites drop in rankings.

Make sure you have a copy of your title just in case your site drops.

The effects can be seen in as little as 48 hours.

KP

[TeamPlayer]

Is the PR really all that important to you though? If you are selling links then it probably will be.

But, if you want to make changes to get more visitors (and surely that is usually the ultimate goal with most webmasters), then that should be the criteria to go by.

[SticKer]

The rankings will be affected for about a week or two after which it should come back to normal depending on how much changes you have made. In this ranking can get better or it might drop.

[DJDave]

Hi everyone,

Many thanks for your feedback on this topic. Your advice is really appriciated and came in very useful.

Thanks,

Dave
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usb & DVD replication

[IC_IC]

Funny, I just posted something similar in the experiments forum. I have found that initially ranking tends to drop but then you can come back strong...it depends on many factors including the competition for the new keywords.

[Sportsgreen]

Sometimes it can work in the opposite way i had one site that had a bit of a repetition problem with keywords and after changing page title the problem was solved but altenratively you can end up being shunted down the results to number 800.