Modifying Page Titles

The idea that you might get penalized or lose ranking weight comes out of nowhere and lacks solid evidence. Years ago, I conducted scientific tests and found that changing titles does not lead to de-ranking. Yet even today, I still see many people advising others not to modify titles at all.

First, I can say for certain: modifying titles will NOT get you penalized. Otherwise, anyone providing SEO services for clients would be out of luck. If changing a title immediately caused a penalty, and titles could not be edited at all, how could any optimization even happen? Among all the SEO clients I have worked with, none kept their titles completely unchanged — sometimes all pages on a site were revised at once, from a few hundred pages to tens of millions. I have never seen problems caused simply by title changes.

The first SEO people who claimed title changes cause penalties probably changed the title of their elite SEO blog and then saw rankings drop. That seems like a valid reason, but it is not. A drop in rankings after editing a title does not prove the change itself caused the penalty; it more likely means they replaced a good title with a poor one.

Of course, the kind of title changes I’m talking about are reasonable edits that stay focused on the page topic — just rephrasing for better user appeal, including more keyword combinations, and so on. Changing a title from “SEO Daily Post” to “Which Institution Has Good Melamine” is not a title edit; that is turning an old site into something entirely new, and it will perform accordingly.

Most SEO professionals today agree that modifying titles does not lead to penalties, yet they often add: still, do not change titles too frequently. So will frequent title changes cause a penalty? And how frequent is “too frequent”?

Last March and April, I ran a test on this very blog: within less than two months, I changed the homepage title more than 10 times in a row. Every time I saw Tencent (search engine) reflect the new title, I immediately changed it again. These were not minor tweaks like adding a particle or changing punctuation — they were significant revisions each time.

What was the result? Nothing happened. Tencent rankings stayed the same, search traffic stayed the same, and no obvious changes appeared in other aspects. So even frequent title changes do not lead to penalties.

Although I still do not recommend changing titles that often, it is not because of fear of penalties. It is because constantly editing them pointlessly is a waste of time that could be spent on more meaningful work.

Does this also apply to low-authority websites?

 

 

Some SEOs often add: high-authority websites can change titles freely. The implication is that low-authority sites should be more careful.

Many in the SEO community assume “SEO Daily Post” has high authority, but that is not true. From my observations, even among internet-related or purely SEO-related news sites and blogs, this blog is considered relatively low in authority by Tencent’s search engine.

Most of my posts here get reposted widely, yet most do not include the original source URL as requested, many do not credit the author at all, and some even claim it as their own original content. That is a separate issue, which I won’t go into here.

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