A week after Google made a change to the titles it produces in its search results, the search company confirmed it actually did make these changes. I mean, why didn't Google just write about it when they first noticed it, did they think we wouldn't notice?
Google said "last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages." Yea, we first covered this title change a week ago last Tuesday, August 17th. Google did confirm the changes on Twitter but only after the SEO community was like, whoa - what did you do to my titles Google?
I then emailed some questions to Google a few days ago, Google's Danny Sullivan answered all of them in this official blog post.
In any event, there are few super interesting things that Google said about this change that I wanted to highlight.
Not Using Queries
The biggest change, I think here, is that Google said it generally will not be using the searcher's query - what the searcher entered into the search box - to produce the title for the search result. Google wrote "before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system. This is because we think our new system is producing titles that work better for documents overall, to describe what they are about, regardless of the particular query."
The title Google uses for your page now won't be dynamic based on the query - which is a big change.
Titles Still Important
Google said for 80% of the titles they use in the search results, those are pulled from the HTML title tag still. The other 20% may be from the header tags or other areas of the visible content on the page. Google said "Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time."
So don't stop making Google titles.
Headers Are More Important Now
When that listing is part of the 20%, it seems like Google is putting more emphasis on the header tags, H1s, H2s, etc. Google said "We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within H1 tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments."
Links Still May Be Used
Sometimes we've seen Google use anchor text links for titles over the years. Google said that can still happen, "other text contained in the page might be considered, as might be text within links that point at pages."
But again, 80% of the time, it will be the title tag.
Google Will Improve
If this week showed anything, it showed that this Google change produced some embarrassing titles. Google is aware of it, like I covered earlier this week, and even said in this blog post it will make more changes and has already made changes, to improve this. Google wrote "already making refinements to our new system based on feedback, and we'll keep working to make it even better over time."
If you see examples of issues, report them to the help forum over here. There is no special form to send examples to:
We linked to the help forum in the blog post. At the moment, I don't think we'll set up a separate report form, but we'll see. Many reports fall into similar categories, so there are already things to improve on :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 25, 2021
New Titles Are Better
That being said, Google said the search team tested this new method of producing titles and the results showed big improvements, enough to launch it. Google said "Our testing shows the change we've introduced produces titles that are more readable and preferred by searchers compared to our old system." I guess Google will keep improving it based on the examples we showed them.
Titles Can Change Fast
Danny Sullivan added that the titles Google uses can react fast to changes you make on your page. So if you update your content, Google then recrawls that page, Google may update the title it uses in the search results in a fairly dynamic manner.
So checked, what I said ... yes. Basically, if we see a page has changed, we'll evaluate that fairly quickly for making title choice.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 26, 2021
Global/All Languages
This change is a global and worldwide update that impacts all regions and all languages:
Yes, global all languages.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 26, 2021
Does This Impact Ranking?
Is Google using our titles for ranking purposes or the new titles Google came up with? It seems like no change was made here, according to Danny.
Do we know if Google is using the HTML title tag or their new butchered up title tag to determine rankings?
— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) August 26, 2021
cc @rustybrick
Our titles, like anyone's titles, are determined by the same system. There's nothing special done for us.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 26, 2021
There aren't multiple title tags. A page has only one title tag. We consider title tags along with all types of other content for ranking purposes. Separately from that is how we may display content. That happens after ranking.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 26, 2021
Here is more on this:
No
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 28, 2021
This is purely a display change. This is not meant to change rankings. It's easier to separate things out for testing. That said, we make ranking changes all the time too, so I wouldn't assume you won't see ranking changes, it's just that they're not due to this :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 29, 2021
Why The Change?
Google said that sometimes the HTML title tags do not describe the page in the best way, Google wrote. "HTML title tags don't always describe a page well. In particular, title tags can sometimes be, very long, stuffed with keywords and lack title tags entirely or contain repetitive "boilerplate" language."
Now, boilerplate is not having a title tag that is in this format [unique content about the page] - followed by the company name. Danny Sullivan said that here:
Not really. Boilerplate is really same exact title on every page.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 25, 2021
So make sure to not just focus on having good actionable HTML titles but also great headers and content on your page.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
