Changing an Aged Category Name

[eugeneku]

I am interested in potentially changing a category name on our site, WirelessEmporium.com.

This section has been called "Covers & Faceplates" for the better part of the decade. However, changing search trends, PPC data and search volume analysis have indicated that our preferable KW combo may be "Cases & Covers" instead.

What are the potentially ramifications of making the switch now? We have a significant amount of age, link juice, etc built up toward our "Covers & Faceplates" section at the moment and all of their relevant URLs.

A change would involve 301 redirects, rewriting of URLs, rewriting of all tags, img alt tags, etc.

[EGOL]

I would simply edit the title tag and the H1.

[SteveTheWoodsman]

After doing a search for "phone covers and faceplates" your website page for that category/tag comes up as #1 in Google's SERPs.  That page has a PR4.  I wouldn't touch it.... if anything I would create duplicate content and then do 301 redirects for all the old tags over to the new tags.  That will avoid penalty for duplicate content but keep the work load down.

Payoff?  If you can get ahead of the upward trend in "cases & covers" then it could be really good... but make sure you do your KW research well.  Positive thing is that you probably won't lose much traffic as you'll most likely maintain your ranking for "covers & faceplates" for a while and then you'll start picking up traffic and rankings for "cases & covers."

If that is too much work, then just do what EGOL suggested.