Change of meta title and page title

[SmAce]

Hi guys,

We are evaluating many of our sites at the moment.
We have a craft site with hundreds of different projects on them, but over the years, the titles used have been really poor as far as description goes.
We are therefore thinking of changing the project titles of up to 1000 projects.
The meta title, url and h2 tags would be changed.

I've read in the past that Google doesn't like changes like these, especially as they could be seen as us SEOing the site - which it is in essence.

Your thoughts on whether this would be a good or a bad thing would be appreciated!

[rainborick]

The search engines don't penalize you for improving the quality of your page titles or headline tags. They only really penalize you for making changes that are deceptive or otherwise in violation of the guidelines (like keyword stuffing). As long as you make the titles and headline tags more descriptive of the page content without excessive keyword repetition, you should actually see some improvement in your rankings.

Changing a high percentage of the URLs on a site is a different matter. Even if you follow the best advice, you're likely to see a dip in your rankings until the search engines have had a change to absorb the changes. Others with more experience can suggest the best approach, but you might consider deploying the content changes, let the pages be crawled and monitor the results before you start changing the URLs. I'm thinking that it will be easier to roll back such changes if you do encounter any problems if the URLs haven't changed, and that you're likely to see a faster recovery when you do change the URLs. But that's speculation on my part.

[FranticFish]

AFAIK url as a ranking factor in its own right is pretty far down the list - if it is one at all. I haven't tested directly myself for a few years but the last I did I went from 'my-keyword' urls to 'id=1' urls in an isolated test (no other changes) with a small site (30 pages) for not very competitive terms (i.e. where you'd expect small changes to be more noticeable) and rankings remained rock solid.

So my advice personally would be to forget the urls (at least for now) unless they are truly awful and creating problems like duplicate content or confusion because they don't reflect your site structure and hierarchy.

You haven't mentioned if you have meta description tags or if you're happy with them. Whilst not a ranking factor, they affect CTR from search engines so a proper unique one is important on every page.

[aristotle]

I agree with what rainborick and FranticFish said. In addition, I would suggest that you make the changes gradually rather than all at the same time.

[HuskyPup]

The meta title, url and h2 tags would be changed.

The meta title and h2 ok however I'm a bit concerned about the url since all SEs would IMHO initially see this as a duplicate page creating some confusion for a while.

If I were going to do this I would be creating each new page with a 301 in place to the new page from the old and this would also help with any bookmarks users may have.

Does your directory structure allow you to do a specific section at a time as an experiment?

[Robert Charlton]

If you change the urls, you must also do 301 redirects. You can't have two similar versions of a page under different urls.

I myself would follow the advice above and make title element and heading changes first... and then perhaps at some later date make url changes, if the current urls are really bad. Otherwise, leave the urls alone.

[SmAce]

Hi guys,

Thanks loads for your advice.
I have to say, my feeling was the same in that I should make the content changes and leave the URLs.
And thanks for the reminder about the 301s - for any change in url I would always implement 301s!

[internetheaven]

The meta title, url and h2 tags would be changed.

Leaving the SEO merits of title and h2 changes aside for the moment ... you're not "changing the url" as you put it. You can't "change" a url in the same way that you change a meta tag or h2 tag.

As others have said, you will have to 301 every single changed page and hope that Google indexes the thousands of 301s BEFORE finding the new pages on its own as I've seen some real damage done by Googlebot when the reverse is true.

301'ing all the pages across 1000 projects to new URLs is simply an astonishing way to be going. Surely the benefits of changing the URls are minimal?

Can you give us more information as to why the URl has to change?