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My page title NEEDS to be changed, what should I do

by livemusic
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have two pages:

red-county.html
green-county.html

And red-county.html is titled "Sell your house in Green county." I made a mistake and it was uploaded months ago and now enjoys the #1 spot in Google for the search term for Red county. But, it should obviously be titled "Sell your house in Red county."

From a SEO standpoint, I can't get any higher than #1. But... when people see this title in the SERP listing, I don't want any of them to click away because they might think it's about Green county, instead of Red county. My red-county.html page is up there because of all of the info about Red county. The page is fine, the title is not.

What do you think I should do?
#changed #page #title
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi Bill,

    Do what you think is right. You are talking about changing the page title to make it more relevant, right? I see no problem with that.

    It is only a problem if you are changing the URL. Everything related to your page's ranking in the search engines is stored by URL. Don't the change the URL if you can help it.
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    • Profile picture of the author livemusic
      Reason I ask is because I had read recently that you are not supposed to change the URL or the title. Beats me. Anyone else?
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Originally Posted by livemusic View Post

        Reason I ask is because I had read recently that you are not supposed to change the URL or the title. Beats me. Anyone else?
        Hi Bill,

        It is important to not change the URL, but the page title is an important element, not only in establishing page relevancy, but in influencing the CTR of your listing in the SERP. You should make every attempt at optimizing your page title.

        In your case, you have an irrelevant page title that you want to change to make it relevant. The result should be far more beneficial than harmful. Now this could cause the search engine to re-evaluate your page and it should find your change to be more relevant and improve your search traffic with more targeted visitors.
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        * Get Results - Outsource Your PPC Management |
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  • Profile picture of the author rahmanpaidar
    Depends which is important for you: your business or your traffic.
    Once you change the title you risk at decreasing temporarily your search engine rank.

    BTW, last time I did a minor change in a main page title, I didn't notice search rank flactuation.
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    • Profile picture of the author JB777
      If you change your page title you risk losing your ranking. Only do it once or you could get heavily penalized for months.

      Changing the title will have a short term negative effect on how my site ranks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Craig McPherson
    Bill,

    I change titles without any trouble as long as the url remains the same.
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  • Profile picture of the author netw6000
    Hello:

    Just go ahead and change it. It's just one of many on page ranking criteria that google uses. Here's a tip for you... I put several keyword phrases in the title seperated by the | character and all the phrases seem to get indexed seperately.
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  • Profile picture of the author leannrimes
    Changing title will really affect the rank of your site.
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