SEO Test: Phrase Focusing [On-Site Optimisation]

Here are the results of my latest test:

TITLE: City Web Design | City SEO, Country

renamed to:

TITLE: City SEO

You would think that clarifying the focus of the website would help its rankings (I've also changed the written content in pages and completely focused the site towards SEO).

Outcome: Nothing different.
Conclusion: For as long as your term is mentioned in all the strategic places you're fine. You shouldn't have to go through extra cleaning effort in order to please search engines (unless of course if benefits the user or your click through ratio).

The site was cached and indexed with the new format and focus, however it didn't affect the results at all.

By the way, the test site holds the same position for:

1) City SEO
2) SEO

Searched in: www.google.com.[country ext]

Another observation I've made was that regular changes of TITLE and H1 cuase inevitable site drop in rankings. This is parhaps an anti-tampering mechanism or maybe pure logic.

Thanks for the info, excellent test. I change my tags every few months and seem to do ok but I will think twice when changing them too often. I have a test idea for you. I have 1000's of press release and article links (as most of you do) that I can change whenever I want. Do the links get devalued if I change them every few months?

Any thoughts?

Thanks

I would say it's probably not going to be picked up, but what you describe is highly irregular from normal web activity. If Google happens to find a pattern then you would be at risk be being flagged for manipulation.

I agree. This is probably an all-around bad idea no matter how you frame it.