I thought Title tag was important

[capsmaster]

By no means do I consider myself a master SEO, but I thought I knew enough to figure this out. That being said I am having a problem that is just mind boggling to me. Whenever I add the my actual keyword phrase in the Title line I drop about 8 spots in the rankings.

For example lets say the keyword phrase I am going for is "blue widgets" so that is what I use in the TITLE bar, yet when I change to "blue gadgets" I jump up 8 rankings for blue widgets which isn't used in the title bar. Which to me doesn't make sense, can anyone shed some light on this one for me. Any replies or help are much appreciated.

[Marcia]

I'm not sure I'm following. How often are you changing it and how often is the ranking changing? How long is it taking to show up?

What about anchor text in links pointing to the page? What's in those?

[Marval]

Marcia...I just saw a similar effect....I had a rather long title (a few extra keywords that were placing well in the SERPs and have for 3 years)...as part of it, the first two words were a very competitive phrase, and is in about half of my anchors back to my site from other sites.(about 3000 of the real backlinks shown in AlltheWeb)

I placed about 60 of 6 mill for the first 2 words, had alot of #1's for other phrases but decided to change one of the 2 words(the word in the second place)free widgets changed to free poppets.

I waited 5 days and now I place between 25-27 for the original phrase dependant on the datacenter. The on page density is about 5 % for that phrase.

Im going to try it on another site to see if the effect is the same.

[HitProf]

capsmaster,

This is similar to what I experienced last week. I added a word to a title, in spite of the chance of ruining the ranking for the old title phrase. In stead, rankings improved for that particular phrase even though it's now split up in the title. Rankings for the new phrase also soared. Neither is in the title exactly as is.

Marcia: this page is reindexed daily.

[Hagstrom]

It sounds like the old semi-penalty, algo-switch, Google-glitch - whatever.

For a long time I was number 2 for a key phrase. Then I added an H1-tag and my index-page promptly disappeared - until I removed the H1-tag again.

Recently I changed the TITLE from "X-city's widgets" to "old gadgets" and now I'm number one for widgets! You gotta love Google :)

[IITian]

Marval,

Try changing the title back to the original and wait for a few days. Do you go back to about 60 or do you improve to about 20 - report here. :) That will be more revealing.

[takagi]

It seems the keyword is in their title tags, once in an alt tag and a few times across the page. It seems like Google gives a big deduction for over optimization.

Off page factors [webmasterworld.com]

[capsmaster]

Thanks for all the replys....
Marcia, I make small little tweaks everyday or so just to try and see where I end up. Sometimes the tweaks are bigger like changing the Title tag. It is taking about 36 hrs give or take 12hrs for me to see the different results in google.

For the anchor text links pointing to the page it is split even between blue widgets and blue gadgets. See until about a month or two ago I didn't think I had a shot at getting blue widgets so I had all my inbound links use blue gadgets (the smaller phrase). So alot of my links to the site were blue gadgets.

Than one day I did a search for blue widgets and I was #5 to my surprise without really being optimized for it so now I have been grabbing links trying to get the bigger phrase yet when I change the title tag I drop to the 2nd page which I don't get.

[Marval]

IITian...I think Ill wait on that as I just realized (log review missed for a few days) that for that second word in the title which is extremely competitive(usually rank somewhere in the 500 or so range) Im ranking 25 out of 115 mill results....Ill put off the testing for right now as Ive got some traffic to direct :)

Of course the cause of this is that the results for some reason starting yesterday, have dropped from 180 mill pages to 115 mill pages across the datacenters? Some type of rearranging going on