Penalty for Changing Home Page Title Tags

[BrandLabs]

Hey Mozzers

I'm certain of the answer to this question, however I wanted to get some input from the experts in Moz-land to hopefully provide some additional perspective.  I recently disagree with a client's assertion that there is some penalty Google levels for changing the title tags of your home page.  Now, I understand changing the title tags can influence serp rankings, however, is anyone aware of some penalty Google levels for simply changing the title tags?  Most of what I've read and experienced has people changing them all the time without some phantom penalty.  It seems to me a problem of correlation = causality, in that people often attribute a drop to an action that may not have actually been the cause.

Anyway, if you have any particular insight on this top I would appreciate it greatly.

thanks!

[Travis-W]

It would help if you provided the original title tag, new title tag, and the page's URL.

As far as I know, there is no special penalty for changing the home page title tag.  Maybe you changed it to irrelevant KW's and that is why your traffic dropped.

[KevinBudzynski]

I have never heard of a penalty for changing a title tag (perhaps the use of a poison word could impact it).

[BrandLabs]

I'm actually not having a problem with it per se.  A client I'm working with swears that he was penalized for changing his title tags, and thus was very upset when I optimized his into 2013 SEO conventions.  I had never heard of this kind of penalty and wanted to check in with people and see if they've experienced anything like it- because I'm pretty certain that's not a thing at all.

How often do you guys update title tags?

[danatanseo]

I have changed title tags on several sites, several times and those sites never experienced any kind of negative impact.

There was one instance in 2009 when I updated a title tag on an ecommerce site. This was one of many changes made at the same time. One of the changes I was "directed" to make was to add about 6-8 really spammy direct links using exact match anchor text to the home page. The site dropped from 1st position for its brand name. The cause was determined to be my optimized title tag....not the spammy links the CEO decided to add to the home page.

Within a few days the site was back in the number one spot. I think this is a good example of the correlation = causuality Brandlabs mentioned above.

Just because I know Brandlabs specializes in Volusion, you might find it interesting that the scenario I just described occurred on a Volusion store.