Seo: Change the title of a page

Question

Lets say my website looks like this:

News
-Hello world
-Foo
-Bar

So the parent page will list the last 3 news messages. For each news message there is a sub-page. For the parent page I was thinking of setting the page title to: News - Hello world, Foo, Bar.

Now if somebody adds a new message the title tag will also change. I googled this and read a few blog posts where people said that changing the title actually hurts the ranking of that page.

So is this true? Should I just set a static title tag for all my pages?

Answer 1

The <title> of a page is one of the most influential factors in a page's ranking. Changing that will definitely have an affect on a page's ranking. Whether that is good or bad depends on which way the rankings move: up or down.

Ideally a page's <title> will rarely, if ever, change. A page with constantly changing messages should probably have a title that summarizes what the purpose of the page is for (listing messages) rather then the latest message posted. If you want to rank well for each message then have each message title link to a page that displays that message and has the <title> of the page be the message title.