As a search engine optimiser, I frequently test out new tactics on this site and other sites I manage. One concept I’ve been playing around with lately is changing post titles after my articles have begun rankings for their primary keywords. The reason I started doing this is because you’ll often hear that you should never change post titles as this could negatively affect your rankings in Google, but just how true is this notion?
My Experience With Changing Blog Post Titles
My article titled “How Someone Could View Private Facebook Photos In 2016” is one of the most popular articles on this website that ranked in positions 1-5 for nearly every variation of the keywords I targeted (and even many I didn’t). Over time, I received new competitors who decided to try ranking for the same keyword set, although none of them were able to outrank my article, that is until I changed the title back in January of 2016.
You see, every year I change some of my article titles to keep the articles “fresh” and relevant in addition to periodically updating the information in those articles throughout the year. This has never caused any issues for me as far as rankings go, although in late December of 2015, I decided to update the 2015 year to 2016 in my Facebook article. Most people would believe that such a small change wouldn’t impact the rankings, but you wouldn’t believe what happened.
My article… lost its rankings.
It was nowhere to be seen for the primary keyword, although it retained its rankings for a few of the variations. This caused my traffic for that article to plummet from 400 readers a day to 80 readers a day.
Before you ask, no, this site was not hit with a manual or algorithmic penalty, nor was I the victim of negative SEO (fun fact: I rely on content marketing for backlinks and my SEO tactics on this website are what you would refer to as “white hat”).
Now, where was I? Oh, that’s right, my article was no longer visible for over half of the keywords I was previously targeting, and the other half were ranking on the second page and beyond. You would think that this was the end for that keyword, and not too long I thought that myself. But then something happened… Something I hadn’t seen in nearly 3 months. The article appeared to have recovered most of its rankings. However, a few weeks later, the article lost its rankings again before regaining them, ostensibly stabilising in positions 5-8 for the last 6 months.
As of 8/22/2016, the article hasn’t budged much for the primary keyword.
My Theory On Why This Happened
Interestingly enough, this is the first time I’ve had this happen when I changed any of my blog post titles, so that begs the question: what happened here? My theory on this is that for articles with dates in the blog post titles, changing the dates can negatively affect your rankings in certain circumstances; perhaps sites that post entirely new articles over sites that merely update their articles are given a preference in these situations. As much as people claim that Google loves fresh, updated content, this scenario seems to be the exception. This is, of course, a theory that needs more testing.