Tweaking titles can ditch your site?

[Whitey]

Tweaking meta titles triggers Google to reassess the entire page/s in it's overall quality considerations. This can lead to a drop in rankings even if an improvement to the meta title has been enacted.

Best to deal with underlying issues first.

True or False?

[tedster]

You mean title elements - <title> not <meta name="title"> - right?

The reports we saw here were mostly about large changes across the website, or continual changes. Haven't seen any reports lately, and I never had it happen personally. Of course, I rarely change titles and if I do it's usually once and done.

[Whitey]

You mean title elements - <title>

- that's right.

Actually I'm suspicious on the basis of 2 observations but it's not conclusive to me, hence the post. It seems a combination of low quality factors kicked in - but not immediately , it seemed to take 4 - 8 weeks from the change, and it was before Farmer.

[Dan01]

On another forum they consensus was that Google doesn't even look at the meta-tags anymore. Personally, I bet they index every word and believe they might still play a role. I don't think they were mentioning <title> per se.

I bet it could affect the ranking Whitey.

I don't change titles either.

[bwnbwn]

I change them all the time if the content on the page changes and don't see an issue. Could if be the title change actually changed the whole content of the page, and that didn't match as well as the original title.

[tedster]

As I remember, the problems came to people who were changing titles repetitively, not just once. That's the kind of thing that could be an attempt to reverse-engineer the algorithm at a low level. In fact, that's kind of what those reports were talking about. Make a title change, watch the results, make another change, etc, until all of a sudden - buried.

[Broadway]

I tweek titles everytime I edit a page's content. I'm not aware of creating any ranking problems.

If Google wants what's best for the site visitor, why wouldn't creating an exactly on-target title follow this way of thinking?

Having said that, I am hesitant to change titles unless on- page content has been revised. Otherwise it does just seem like title tweeking for rankings.