Hello,

I have been changing the title regulary on a few sites to try and find what the best keyowrds etc. are and was wondering will Google or any other Search Engine penalise me for doing this?

Kind Regards

Robert

They won't penalize you, but it's going to be hard to measure the changes if you change things too often. You may end up thinking one change made the difference when it was really the change you had made a few days earlier.

It's fine to make changes as long as you realize the change could be bad just as well as it could be good. I assume you want to measure what happens with each change and then use the one that worked the best.

One other thing to consider is that if you're doing any other seo on the sites that other seo can be causing the change in ranking as well. The only way to really measure the effect of the title change is to make sure you don't change anything else.

To make sure the title change has been picked up check the cache the search engine has for the site. Once you see your new title in the cached page you know it's been picked up and can measure how it's working.

But no penalties. You can change your title as often as you want.

Thank you very much for your very informative help

Glad to have helped.

Agree with vangogh. At most only change <title></title> every 6 weeks or so so you can see what effect changes are actually having in rankings but you are right, the Google algorithm currently gives title tags a high weighting in it´s algorithm so changes here can make a real difference. Be careful not to include more than 15-20 words within tags though which is what Google suggests.

D.

i have read somewhere that too frequent changes in title and anchor text in the web page lead search engines to think it as a page under construction and may penalise it.

Originally Posted by crush123

i have read somewhere that too frequent changes in title and anchor text in the web page lead search engines to think it as a page under construction and may penalise it.

Ignore it! It's total crap.

sites get penalised for blatantly trying to trick the SEs algo.

Changing the title of a page so often won't really tell you anything. The issue being you have no idea what changes on other pages on competing sites will affect your page.
If the web was a static environment, then yes, you could draw some conclusions.

If google were to give any attention to how often a page is changed (which they don't) they would rather you change it.. It shows the webmaster is interested and intent on giving users the best most accurate information they can.

btw, Check out how well wikipedia ranks
That mother is being edited thousands of times a day..

There's nothing wrong with changing your page titles. If anything making changes will just being search engine spiders back more often since they want to have the correct page info in the index.

Like Chris said and like I mentioned above though constantly changing page titles isn't going to give you much useful information about the effect the change is having. If you keep everything else on your page static and change the title it will take a few weeks (or at least until your page has been reindexed) to see if there was any change in your ranking. Very little of course is static since there might be new links out there pointing to your page.

You can affect your ranking by changing your page title. In fact your title is one of the most important on page factors in determining your rank. However changes can be bad as well as good and if you want to measure the the effect of any change you can't keep changing things very often.