Would adding and abbreviation to a title hurt?

[EcommerceSite]

I have been trying to figure this out- https://moz.com/community/q/what-should-i-do-with-old-e-commerce-item-pages

I added n/a to the end of the page titles so I could figure out how these pages were performing. Since I added them my organic traffic has seemed to have dropped. It has only been a few days so maybe it is an anomaly. Everything else has stayed the same, would this cause an organic traffic drop?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there

You said "Since I added them my organic traffic has seemed to have dropped". Organic traffic to those exact pages? or other pages? You should be able to see it in Google Analytics under landing pages.

The only thing I can think of is that organic traffic is directly related to rankings, so, have you seen drop in rankings? were those pages you changed ranking for many keywords?

[EcommerceSite]

We only changed it on item pages and traffic dropped on both item and category pages.

It did line up perfectly with this though https://www.seroundtable.com/google-algorithm-update-chatter-spikes-22472.html

[RuthBurrReedy]

It's unlikely that changing title tags would have an impact on traffic to pages whose title tags hadn't been changed; and adding a few characters to the end of a title tag isn't something I'd expect to have a negative impact on traffic, either. It's likely that they are unrelated.

[EcommerceSite]

That was kind of my thought as well but with the drop in traffic I have to look at everything. SO strange.