Changing Title of the Page, and what it does to SERP and Page Rank

Changing Title of the Page (while keeping content the same)

[bastardino]

I know this is slighty off topic here but perhaps someone could help:

I have recently changed the name of my page from widgets.asp to Widgets_Widgets.asp on one of my main content pages. Everything else remains exactly the same. Now, it appears google has yet to index that page, which is what I am waiting for, however, my question is will the bot assign the old PR to that page and give it its old power, or do I need to wait for months for that to happen? Also, should I change the name back to what it was?

Thanks,

[JKMitchell]

If all you have done is change the page name (file name is not the title of the page by the way) then this is a new page and would not be assigned any visible page rank by Google until two things happen.

1. There are links into the page

2. The PR is updated (I guess you are using the Google toolbar - this is only updated once in a while, I think the last time was September 2005).

[Receptional]

You should set up a redirect at widgets.asp (the old page URI) that is a 301 redirect to widgets_widgets.asp. This does two things:

1) Anyone who bookmarked tha old page will not get a dead link
2) Google will update its index rather than dropping your old page and starting afresh.

Dixon.