Downsides on shortening article title?

[RaoulWB]

Hi there,

I'm new to Moz: great tool so far!

I just tried the page optimization feature and see that (for instance for this article) page titles are often too long. Now it's tempting to just shorten the title straight away, but I have a memory of someone once telling me changing the title will change the URL. And changing the URL is something not appreciated by Google.

Could someone please explain if and why this is/isn't the case? And if there are any downsides/things to consider before changing the article's title?

Thank you in advance!

[josellamazares]

Hello,
It is independent, you can change your title and not change the url. Many times to improve the CTR the SEO title is changed. Changing the url is more delicate, first you must study the risks it has for the positioning of that url. If you have received links to that url you could lose them, etc.

Regards

[Christy-Correll]

Hi  RaoulWB,

Welcome to the Q&A forum! As far as the search engines are concerned, the title and URL of a page are independent. However, some content management systems create the URL based on the page title, and may automatically update and redirect the URL if you update a title (depending on how the CMS is configured, etc.). Is this possibly what you are thinking of? 

Christy

[Salience_Search_Marketing]

Hey,

Agree with the other replies but wanted to mention that changing your article title may have an adverse affect on the ranking performance of your content, so be careful and do some solid research before making a change.

Thanks!

Salience

[RaoulWB]

Thank you for your replies José, Christy and Salience,

It looks like you are right, and the ('SEF URL') is fixed: it will not change when I change the title: https://screencast.com/t/XR6lS6YdL

For now -changing URLs- sounds a bit too risky for me to start with yet. I'm just trying to create the best articles, contentwise.

Feels a bit odd that URLs are going to be different from the titles though. But I guess that's a better situation than having titles that are too long.