Does changing a website's title affect rankings?

[davyeminy]

I changed my websites title,,just like seomoz changed to moz, only to receive a massive drop in rankings. I am still waiting to know if it will come back. Rankings drop came just after the sites title was updated on search results. Could site title mentions on the web be a core ranking signal?

[lammert]

Based on your example seomoz, do you mean that your domain name has changed? That can have a severe impact on rankings if you are not properly redirecting traffic from the old domain name to the new.

[davyeminy]

Nope.. Just site title..

[not2easy]

By "site title" do you mean the "Site Title" in WordPress under General Settings? Or should we keep guessing?

I apologize if that seems rude, but we do sort of expect to have an understanding of the scenario before an appropriate response can be offered. ;)

[davyeminy]

Yeah..
Site title..
Name of a business..
Name of a website..

[Dimitri]

Today, anything can produce rank change. Even doing nothing can cause rank drop (or increase).

Now, I still believe that its the content itself which is influencing drop or increase of ranking (keep in mind that ranking algorithms change all the time, a drop in ranking, doesn't mean your content is less good, simply that the algorithm is evaluating it differently, ... and in the opposite an increase in ranking doesn't mean the content get better :))

[lucy24]

Name of a website.

There’s no such thing, unless you’re referring to one of those CMS doodads as suggested by not2easy. We’ve already established that you don’t mean domain name. (Whew!)

I really, really hope you are not saying that all pages have the identical <title> tag, but I really can’t think of anything else that would qualify as “title of site”.

[aristotle]

I've always understood the "site title" to be the title of the home page. In google's search results, a few years ago for all of my sites, google began adding that title to the titles of other pages in its display of the results.

For a hypothetical example, if the title of my site's home page is "Antique Widgets", and the title of an article page is "Recent Discoveries", then in the search results google will show the title as:

"Antique Widgets - Recent Discoveries"

When google first began doing this with my sites, I complained here that they were changing my page titles and had no right to do so. But now I'm reconciled to it. Sometimes it's an improvement but not always.