Last week we were the first to report on the change Google made around its titles in the Google search results. In short, Google seems to be showing less titles from the title tags than it did the week prior. Google has been listening to the feedback and has said it hopes to make improvements based on what SEOs have been sharing.
What changed was that instead of Google Search displaying the title tag in your meta data for your site as the clickable title in your search result snippet, Google would use your header. Now, we know Google has often not used title tags for those links, and that they can change based on the query. But there was a change or tweak Google made to use the title tag less often then it did prior. And by the way, no, this is not related to passage based ranking.
Danny Sullivan of Google has been dealing with the brunt of the feedback on this change. In short, Danny explained that he has heard the feedback and he is looking for ways to make improvements. The improvements can be many things but he specifically said:
(1) Ways to make sure the snippets show the most relevant and useful clickable titles.
(2) Maybe provide a mechanism for site owners to communicate to Google via Search Console when the title is not right.
Improvements To Snippets
On the first point, here are tweets from Danny Sullivan on making improvements to this change. Of course, he says it is not new, but the change Google made did shuffle things up - so there was some sort of tweak here:
It's kind of surprising that I keep seeing so many SEOs who seem to believe title tags were always exactly used as titles. Not been the case for as long as I can remember. Explained on our help page: https://t.co/bDsZEq0sxH pic.twitter.com/Esv8H6MceX
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 19, 2021
All that said, again -- the feedback has been heard, and we're looking at some of these examples to improve our systems.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 19, 2021
John Mueller of Google said they are collecting examples for these improvements:
Yeah, I've collected some of those to pass on to the team as well. It's hard for me to judge if those are due to this update, but it's good feedback neverless. If you have examples that weren't shared already, I'd love to have them!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 23, 2021
Search Console Tool for Snippets
Danny Sullivan added that maybe Google, maybe through Search Console, can "find a mechanism for site owners to very selectively indicate if there are problematic titles." Here is what he said on that topic:
My thought is that we could perhaps allow a set number per site, maybe 5-10, and also with an expiration period. That way people wouldn't make wholescale long-term mistakes accidentally, but we have some balance for when our automatic title selection might not be preferred.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 20, 2021
I think that would be cool!
Anyway, it seems like the feedback on this change has been heard and I am looking forward to seeing what changes Google make based on this.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
