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Recently there has been a great deal of interest in this issue. Can a webmaster get by with making a change to an existing and successfully pageranked web page?

Question is: Why would you want to do that. Answers vary from –

1. Our core business has changed, so we want to change our site’s name and headings on the front and many of the inside pages.
2. We didn’t think the title or headings through when we wrote them. Now we think adding a new word or phrase might do even better than the current content is.
3. Our competition is using a more popular keyword and ranks well. We’d like like to try that one.

Let’s consider each of these:

If Your Core Business Has Changed

Why not just create and promote a new web-site? Domain names are cheap at GoDaddy.com or their resellers — about $9.00 each for the dot-coms. Only takes a few minutes to buy one and install Wordpress or similar content management software, like Joomla or perhaps Druple.

Why go to all this trouble? Because changing the TITLE or H1, H2 tags on an existing web page will create a “virtually new” page anyway for Google, Yahoo and MSN and the other crawlers. From their point of view, the site is now “about” something different. Your title and h1-h2 tags plus the first few hundred words of text inside the page, and the keywords of linked phrases pointing INTO the page from the outside, are the main determinants of what your page is ABOUT from the point of view of the crawlers.

If the page becomes “about” something different, then you’ll lose the old traffic. Plus the exterior or extrernal backlinks pointing into the old “about-ness” are now worthless. They are relevant to the new page, or at least not AS relevant.

So, your existing page rank will decrease for your old targeted keywords. And, any existing organic traffic you get from those keywords will decrease too.

However, if you don’t care about people coming into your new site anyway, because you are now selling hot dogs and used to be selling ice cream, then why not go ahead and change the title? A drop in irrelevant traffic shouldn’t hurt.

Related Posts:

1. Are You Over-Optimizing Your Pages?
2. SEO Success Stories from the Search Engine Pages We’ve Designed Following Our Rules for Optimizing Web Sites for Highest Page Rankings and Top Search Results Listings
3. Search Engine Optimization: Do It Yourself How To’s for Website Positioning, Promotion, Design and HTML Tips to Get Top Search Engine Page Ranking and Highest Search Results Listings, with Best Keyword Use & Correct Page Layout
4. “100% Guaranteed” Good Page-Rank for Your New Site — The Right Way
5. Google SEO Engineer Matt Cutts “Spills the Beans”
6. K.I.S.S. Rules for Maximizing Free Traffic from Search Engines Like Google
7. SEO Tips: Do Long URLs Hurt or Help Increase Google Pagerank?
8. Internal Linking Strategies: SEO in 2008

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