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Ranking drop from 4.5 to 40+ after title change?

by Eduard Jackson
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So I'm fairly new to this SEO stuff as you will glean from this question: is it possible to massively drop in ranking after a simple title change?

I've been focused on one specific keyword which is the name of a competitors site. I thought to myself it might be a good idea to update the title (hadn't been updated in over 6 months) to gain a higher CTR. It did just that. CTR went from .25% to .50% virtually overnight which was a huge impact, then dropped off after 3 days for that specific keyword.

Now here is the strange part, the keyword in question is a 3 word phrase, and I was ranking around 4.5 for both wordwordword and word word word versions of the phrase. I changed the title to closely match the "word word word" version of the keyword, however, I only dropped rankings for the "wordwordword" version of the keyword. The downside is the version without spaces has 4x the volume as the spaced phrase.

I reverted the title 2 days ago to the original, but I'm guessing all hope is lost.

Hoping some experts can weigh in here. I spent an enormous amount of time and money ranking for that keyword, and now I feel as all is lost
#change #drop #ranking #title
  • Profile picture of the author mrhmamun
    Keep Clam & Ping this post, within 7-15 days it will get position.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by Eduard Jackson View Post

    So I'm fairly new to this SEO stuff as you will glean from this question: is it possible to massively drop in ranking after a simple title change?

    I've been focused on one specific keyword which is the name of a competitors site. I thought to myself it might be a good idea to update the title (hadn't been updated in over 6 months) to gain a higher CTR. It did just that. CTR went from .25% to .50% virtually overnight which was a huge impact, then dropped off after 3 days for that specific keyword.

    Now here is the strange part, the keyword in question is a 3 word phrase, and I was ranking around 4.5 for both wordwordword and word word word versions of the phrase. I changed the title to closely match the "word word word" version of the keyword, however, I only dropped rankings for the "wordwordword" version of the keyword. The downside is the version without spaces has 4x the volume as the spaced phrase.

    I reverted the title 2 days ago to the original, but I'm guessing all hope is lost.

    Hoping some experts can weigh in here. I spent an enormous amount of time and money ranking for that keyword, and now I feel as all is lost





    Yes, it's common for a page to lose Google SERP rank If you change a page title after the page is already ranked.

    It could bounce back to the previously ranked SERP position If you revert back to the old exact page title text. There's no guarantees but odds are it will bounce back to a close SERP position.

    What you need to do is get Google to find the page/URL again and reindex the page. Look at the Google cache page date, odds are you're making changes and not waiting long enough for Google to catch up with your page edits.

    Anytime you make a page edit you have to wait for Google to get caught up with you and find the new page/edits otherwise all you're doing is wasting time/effort. If Google never finds the page/edits they'll never update the SERPs. It takes time.

    Like I said, watch the Google cache date, that's proof the last time Google visited your page.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Yeah be careful with that kind of tweaking - my general rules is unless you have great links and lots of them and think something is holding the page back - once you get top four its time to stop tweaking the critical content and concentrate on link building to move up further.
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    • Profile picture of the author Eduard Jackson
      Originally Posted by Mike Anthony View Post

      Yeah be careful with that kind of tweaking - my general rules is unless you have great links and lots of them and think something is holding the page back - once you get top four its time to stop tweaking the critical content and concentrate on link building to move up further.
      Makes total sense. I hadn't really even thought to adjust the title, but when looking at my actual result in Google I thought: thats not a very attractive title. As soon as I changed it CTR doubled, so clearly it "worked" in the sense of being more clickable. Thats what boggles my mind: Google has me ranked for a keyword for which I really have no business being ranked with very low CTR, the page title changes and suddenly CTR goes up... shouldn't Google reward that behavior? Or is it triggering some kind of spam mechanism? Or perhaps I just got slapped in general for changing the title. Will follow up in a week with results.

      Thanks for input from everyone.
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      • Profile picture of the author DABK
        You must have ranked high for wordforword because nobody went for it, they went for word for word.

        Google rewarded you for going for wordforword.

        You stopped going for wordforword and went for word for word, which seems to be more competitive. Google rewarded you by placing you in the right place (from an SEO point of view).

        Originally Posted by Eduard Jackson View Post

        Makes total sense. I hadn't really even thought to adjust the title, but when looking at my actual result in Google I thought: thats not a very attractive title. As soon as I changed it CTR doubled, so clearly it "worked" in the sense of being more clickable. Thats what boggles my mind: Google has me ranked for a keyword for which I really have no business being ranked with very low CTR, the page title changes and suddenly CTR goes up... shouldn't Google reward that behavior? Or is it triggering some kind of spam mechanism? Or perhaps I just got slapped in general for changing the title. Will follow up in a week with results.

        Thanks for input from everyone.
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        • Profile picture of the author Eduard Jackson
          Originally Posted by DABK View Post

          You must have ranked high for wordforword because nobody went for it, they went for word for word.

          Google rewarded you for going for wordforword.

          You stopped going for wordforword and went for word for word, which seems to be more competitive. Google rewarded you by placing you in the right place (from an SEO point of view).
          Right, that makes sense. Now I have a difficult decision to make, as my CTR is higher with the more ideal title, but I'll get less overall impressions. I'll need to roughly calculate which is better in about a weeks time. It looks like other unrelated keywords got higher CTR as well, so the new title was just overall much better.

          One reason I wanted to change it was Google prepended my domain name to the title such as:

          Mydomain.com: A pretty terrible title

          Whereas the actual title of the page was <title>A pretty terrible title - Mydomain</title>

          Notice the .com is not there on my title, Google basically re-did my title to what it would think was better, but ended up looking even more weird.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ernest Spencer
    Oh boy what a mistake. Just give it some time to recover its position.
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  • Profile picture of the author patco
    Normal GOOGLE DANCE effect! Just continue writing content and/or building backlinks. It should be OK in a few days!
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Originally Posted by patco View Post

      Normal GOOGLE DANCE effect! Just continue writing content and/or building backlinks. It should be OK in a few days!
      That's NOT human. No way.

      Here's the thing. If your title sucked, and you ranked #1 for whatever, who cares? You got zero to little traffic.

      If you now get real, meaningful traffic, then you are ranking for something else. And that might be a good thing.

      Nobody is going to click on #40, so you would never have any stats for that. If you claim you are getting clicks, then you are not #40.

      You never want to kill the golden goose, but if it's nickel, it might pay to take a chance. An experiment could be done the right way, but it's a longer term test.

      Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author Eduard Jackson
    Well, I am unhappy to report that even after reverting the title - the ranking has not recovered. Its a terrible shame as I had a few links with my target keywords built around the same tim the ranking dropped.

    It has now been 20 days since the title change, and while the ranking has gone back up, its now 7.5 whereas before it was 4.1 so basically useless.

    I have decided to use the new title again as its more attractive and gets many clicks from other keywords.
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