Is Google penalizing white hat SEO?

[monger]

We don't usually spend much time on SEO but when I noticed that a dynamic search return page ranked PR2 for a very good keyword I updated the dynamically generated title from <title>XY Company - search results</title> to just <title>keyword</title>, i replaced a long list of default keywords with just 5 or so that make sense and I rewrote the description to a 10 word pitch.

Two days later I am on PR3 with this page.

Last time I checked (two years ago), this type of SEO would have improved my ranking. Is this not true anymore?

[tedster]

Saying you went from PR2 to PR3 does not sound like a problem - it's an improvement. Are you confusing PR (PageRank) with search rankings?

[stinkfoot]

SEO of any form in Googles eyes can be bad. The reasoning? You are not writing the information with your reading public in mind. You are writing it for the search engine.

[jakegotmail]

Disagree with the above comment.

Moving a descriptive title tag to the front of it is better for the engines and the users.

ie. Blah blah blah blah - Blah.com

is better than

Blah.com - Blah blah blah blah

Tabbed browsing will cut off the end and you will not be able to see the page title when there are 12 open at one time.

[londrum]

i think it's more to do with user behaviour nowadays.

improving your title tag, keyrwords and description in itself won't improve your ranking.

but now that you've done it, more people are likely to click on your link in the search results. so your page will get more visits. and that is what google will measure (through their cookies, toolbar and analytics). that is what will improve your ranking in the long-run. but they can't calculate that in a second like they did with the old-style on-page factors, back in the day. you've got to give them time to measure the performance.

[g1smd]

Toolbar Pagerank is updated only a very few times per year.

The values are usually several months out of date at any time.

It just so happens that the Toolbar was updated only last week.

[stinkfoot]

>Moving a descriptive title tag to the front of it is better for the engines and the users.

So, when was the last time you did this en-mass and then got a better search engine ranking?

Taking for granted that it was not in the last 5 years, what advantage to the user would partaking of this "white hat SEO" maneuver be?

As i remember webpages titles, as displayed by some searches engines, was increase some 2 or 3 years ago to allow 50+ characters to be displayed.

[monger]

Saying you went from PR2 to PR3 does not sound like a problem - it's an improvement. Are you confusing PR (PageRank) with search rankings?

you are 100% right tedster, which just goes to show how little i know or do about seo.

so yes, we slipped from page 2 to page 3 in google search rankings.
we had been on page 2 for a few months and i found us on page 3 the day after we updated the tags.