Shortened page titles and changed urls to match, will this effect my page rankings?

[dclauser]

In my recent crawl, I was given a bunch of 200 errors for having titles too long, i rewrote the titles and changed the URLs to match (using wordpress). I was then informed by my boss that changing the URLs like I did (www.website.com/abc ->www.website.com/xyz) may have changed our page rank for those pages and if so i should revert them to the old urls.

There are about 14 titles in total that I made these changes to. Would it be quicker to change the URL's to their old names, or better for me to use 301 redirects to point the old urls to the new ones?

Will either renaming the urls of the new titled blogs with their old titles or using 301 redirects have better SEO results?

Does wordpress automatically make these redirects for me? When I click a link of the old urls I kept saved in a document it still goes to the page.

[Lumina]

If I understood what you're saying, it seems as though you may have mistaken page title and URL for the same thing. You can alter a page title without affecting the URL and vice versa. For example, in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), the blue text shown for each result is the page title, while the URL is in green text.

Now, with that said, page titles shouldn't exceed about 150 characters. This is because after this point, the title will be truncated and the entire title will, therefore, not be shown (only part of it will).

Regarding switching the URLs back to their originals, I'd recommend simply changing them back to what they were rather than redirecting them. Either way, it sounds like this whole endeavor has hurt your SEO, and either method may have implications. When you do this, any URL that is not hardcoded should be fixed by WordPress automatically. What this means is, while links populated internally (ex: in menus, navigation, footer)  should be changed by WordPress without you having to do anything - though I'd strongly suggest you double-check these manually. However, the hardcoded links (ex: links in body text, images, some widgets) might not be resolved by WordPress automatically. These you will probably need to tend to on your own. Meaning, if in the second paragraph of blog article A, you link to blog article B: you'll probably need to edit the page for blog article A and replace the old URL with the new.

If you need any clarifications or further help, please ask! And sorry if I mistook anything you'd said.

[Lumina]

Also, for the future, I recommend using two plugins for WordPress:

1. Redirection by John Godley: This plugin lets you set up redirects within the WP dashboard, which means you can keep track of what's being redirected where within your WP administration.
2. Yoast SEO by Team Yoast: This plugin lets you add and edit a lot of different SEO-related items, gives you tips regarding keywords you want to focus on, and a lot more. It's incredibly useful.

To be clear, I don't work for or with either of these developers/teams, but they're great plugins that sound as though they'd be especially helpful for you.