Influence changing the title tags

Will it affect my rankings?

[Mikey85]

Hi,

My website is running very good, but I always think it can run even better...

I'm wondering if I change the title tags of my page, it will affect my google ranking?

My website is about classified ads. The current title tag of a classified ad page is like this:

Title of the classified ad / Subcategoryname / Categoryname

I would like to change it into just only:

Title of the classified ad

Will this affect my rankings?
Is it worth the risk?

[goodroi]

Your title tags will impact rankings for all search engines. I would slowly make changes to title tags because massive changes can accidentally trigger some spam filters. Instead of making a sidewide change think about testing one subcategory at a time.

When dealing with title tags you need to look at the length of the title tags and the presence of keywords. If your ads have very short descriptions and/or lack any keywords then it could be helpful to add your internal category names.

If your users are already stuffing keywords into long ad titles, you probably wouldn't want to add anything. Ideally your pages should have title tags that are not too long or stuffed with repetitive keywords.

[g1smd]

Make sure you sign up for Google WMT.

It can give you some very good clues when your title and meta description is too short/too long/doesn't match the page content/ isn't unique within your site.

[Mikey85]

Test it on 1 subcategory would be nice, but I don't think it's possible because...

my subcategory url's are like this: www.domein.com/category/subcategory

and my classified ads (content) are like this:

www.domain.com/classified-ad-title.html...

so I don't think I can find the test results in google analytics?