Adjusted order of title tags - rankings tanked - Part 2

[Mikey85]

Regarding this topic [webmasterworld.com...] :

I'm concidering to change the title tag of my 200.000 indexed pages.

current title tag:

Product title - Subcategory - Category

I want to change it into:

Product title

Will this affect my google rankings? Will my pages get a drop in ranking?

[edited by: tedster at 11:08 pm (utc) on Mar. 19, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[tedster]

You certainly found the right thread to read. If you feel you "must" change your titles, you now understand the risks. Some people have no problems when they make this kind of changes, but others... well, you've read the thread. No one can give you any guarantees.

If your website is quite strong and trusted, with a diverse and well-developed backlink profile and search traffic from a wide variety of searches, you'll probably be OK. Even then, if your infrastructure allows, you might consider changing a section or two and see how Google responds - rather than change all 200,000 titles at once.

[potentialgeek]

Mikey85: The risk isn't worth it. What exactly do you see as the advantage of removing the subcategory and category from the title tag?

p/g

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

[JS_Harris]

Google already got a good "read" on what you pages are about and the title of each played a role in that. Now you can change the titles and Google will eventually re-learn the pages but in the interim expect rankings to get thrashed if you make too many changes at once.

Your plan sounds like a good one but definitely test for effect first.