Pricing in Title - will this hurt my organic ranking?

[joestern]

I just got great pricing from my distributor for a commodity item. I've lowered the price on my site, and in my Adwords ads.

I have pretty good coverage on this keyword in Google organics. So I'm tempted to put the new, very low, price in the title of the page, so that it'll show in Google in the organics.

I've historically never put prices in titles. Am I asking for lower search rankings with this approach?

[rj87uk]

It might depend on where in the title it goes if you put it last in the title it shouldn't affect rankings too much. However what I have found is that if you do have a great price the CTR will be a lot higher in the serps so even if you go down one or two places you still might end up with more traffic as more people will click on your good priced product listing.

Thats just my thoughts - Sounds good & I would do it.

[pageoneresults]

I've historically never put prices in titles. Am I asking for lower search rankings with this approach?

I wouldn't think so. In fact, I think that might be a +1 point somewhere in the process when searching for and/or comparing prices.

The thing to worry about here is cache. If for some reason you need to change it back, there may be challenges. I "might" noarchive those pages where you are going to put pricing into titles, descriptions, etc. That way if you do change back, at least someone won't be coming in through a cached version showing that "unbelieveable low price" wondering where the heck it "went".

[joestern]

Right - I'm definitely worried about that, but I think I get cached every day or so.

In any event, I made the change. Hopefully tomorrow it'll get spidered and propagate.

I'll try to report back.

[joestern]

Well, my price showed up in the search results today. Unfortunately, competitors are now below my price. But, fortunately, that's not obvious on any search pages. We'll see how it goes.

[stinkfoot]

> Unfortunately, competitors are now below my price.

To be fully prepared, always expect the unexpected.

With reference to the rest of your post: changing your page titles and or headings too regularly can be seen as "gaming" Google. As I remember there were some issues about this some 3 years ago or so.

As I personally changed some titles of my own pages, Matt Cutts popped up with a long diatribe about how it is "gaming" and not useful to users. I beg to differ with your own case in mind.

None the less, imo, test with a low ranked page first before you use it on a high ranked one.