Google removed me from search results after title SEO?

Question

I am improving the SEO for out website. According to the best practices, I have changed more than 3 thousands of our content titles to become SEO friendly:

1. Shortened them to under 70 characters (they where more than 130 chars.)
2. Changes the keywords according to the google trends.
3. and so on...

I am pretty sure that the SEO changes that I made to my pages were really good, but I have seen that Google removed some of my pages from the first page of the search results. I dont' know where are they now! I could not find them in first 20 pages of Google! They where in the first page, but now they are not even though they are more SEO friendly!

I know that it is indexed in google. It shows the result with a site: search.

How long does Google need after performing title changes before my site is back again in the results? Does Google normally demote a site when it detects a lot of changes in the website contents?

Answer 1

The title tag is one of the most important factors for Google to figure out what your site is about. If you have changed them drastically, for example by choosing a different main keyword and removing the original, the search engine might conclude that that post is no longer relevant for the search query it originally ranked for. As a consequence, it might remove it. I think your best bet is to check on the pages that disappeared from the first page and try to figure out what made them rank high in the first place. Maybe you can revert back to something closer to the original titles with less drastic changes.

Answer 2

1. Have you tried Googling your new titles, then going to the third or 4th page to check to see if your new titles are reindexed but on different search queries.

I know that when you index for a search query with heavy competition, you'll often start a few pages down and a good way to mitigate this if it is the case is to run Google ads to the page. After a bounce rate is established, if the bounce rate is low you'll often increase in page position quickly.

2. If the above isn't the answer, try going to the new GSC interface and putting one of them into inspect URL, it will tell you if it's indexed or not and if there are any issues with it.

3. Crawling can take some time too if your crawl budget isn't super big and you have a massive website to crawl it can take a ton of time for it to crawl the whole thing. Like many places will see a few hundred pages crawled a day. A great way to increase this rate is to decrease the page size. You can do this by minimizing images, running your html, css and js through minification tools. As a direct result, you can reduce the size of the page and increase the number of pages crawled per day because the crawl budget is by data.