Why does changing the page title affect keyword rankings? How to fine-tune your title without affecting your keyword rankings?
Presumably, this is a problem that many SEO beginners have encountered, so how to solve it?
How does changing the page title affect your SEO Rankings & Traffic
The title of a web page is one of the core ranking factors of a website. After the search engine crawls the website, it will build an index in the database.
When a user uses the characteristic search phrase "keyword" to conduct a search query, the search engine or according to the data indexed in the database will make an index.
A ranking to find the most relevant, quality, and authoritative (title relevance accounts for a large proportion) to display.
Titles are very important to search engines as well as readers. It's important to strike the right balance between readability and SEO friendliness before deciding on a title.
If your post has been out for a while and has a specific title, if you don't like the previous title, or if the post isn't ranking so well, then I'd try editing the title to hopefully improve it.
However, if you are happy with the rankings, I would recommend keeping the title as major changes may cause a change in rankings. Because most title changes have the potential to impact SEO results.
If you want to add new keywords, create new content and use new titles and key tags on new pages, it should be very helpful to change title tags that are already dominant on Google or other search engines, but ultimately if you think You didn't add the correct title, you can tweak it a bit.
When you change content, you should always be careful not to change key elements that were previously ranked.
Search engines like Google can monitor changes in key elements such as H1, H2, meta description, title, etc., so if these elements change, the ranking of the page will be messed up because Google does not want people to modify the page to improve the ranking – if Already ranking, why radically change the page?
Therefore, when making changes to the page, you should keep key elements while improving the page in other ways such as adding the content itself.
It's usually best to change pages over a period of time rather than all at once, so if you've been doing a lot, Google may have embraced this and will likely lose your rankings and improve over time - Those pages are being considered as new pages that do not exist.
Example 1: Title completely changed
Take this blog as an example, the grassroots SEO blog was launched for the first time with the title "Nanning SEO_Nanning Google Ranking Optimization - Grassroots SEO Blog".
The website was located in the Nanning area. , Because the strategy was changed to the whole country, the website title was changed to "We Media-Grassroots SEO Blog Focusing on SEO/SEM Online Marketing Promotion Tutorial", and the website was updated with a snapshot after the change.
Two days later, Nanning SEO and Nanning Google SEO keywords The ranking slipped to page five and then disappeared. (Because Google relies on page titles and main inner pages to rank search phrases if the title is completely changed, the previously obtained keyword rankings will of course disappear)
Example 2: Title fine-tuning
Speaking of title tweaks, there are two common changes. The first: change the order of keywords contained in the title, and the second: expand or simplify the title.
So will these two fine-tuning methods have an impact on keyword rankings?
- The first one is order change: As we all know, Google and other search engines rely on the keywords appearing in the title to rank web pages, and the keywords appearing in the first title occupy the largest proportion. For example, when we search for "SEO optimization" before the search results The ten first keywords all appear as "SEO or the combination of SEO optimization and SEO optimization. If the word SEO optimization is fine-tuned to the second or the end of the title keyword separator, it is likely to affect the previously established keywords. Ranking Results".
- The second is to simplify and expand the title. Many friends may add a title at will in the initial stage of building the website. After a few days, they feel that the title is not ideal, so modify the title. If it is just fine-tuning, no matter how you change it, as long as it is good Aspects change (relevance, enhanced main content matching, semantic modification) can improve the effectiveness of existing keyword rankings to a certain extent. If it is not good (keyword stacking, inducing clicks, etc.), it is also very important. Word ranking has a negative effect, causing rankings to drop.
If you rank really well for that page for a particular keyword/phrase, you don't need to change the title/description much. If it's not broken, why fix it?
You can try experimenting with less important page titles and see what happens, whether your changes to the title make your search rankings drop or actually help.
I can understand you want to modify these titles to make them more attractive so you have better CTR because a good title will attract more people and minor grammar changes shouldn't affect your page rank, but a major overhaul is not recommended.