Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 3:59 AM
Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.
We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.
Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML. For example, a title using simply the word "Home" is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.
For more information about how you can write better titles and meta descriptions, and to learn more about the signals we use to generate alternative titles, we've recently updated the Help Center article on this topic. Also, we try to notify webmasters when we discover titles that can be improved on their websites through the HTML Suggestions feature in Webmaster Tools; you can find this feature in the Diagnostics section of the menu on the left hand side.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Webmaster Help Forum.
42 comments:
Will there be an report on what title tag did in fact generate the click(s)? e.g. in webmastertools or analytics?
Lol. I hope your page titles aren't as long as your username Zoekmachine Marketing Consultant Wouter Blom :)
We've been explaining Google's practice of replacing Meta Titles in search for relevance to keyword query in the context of SEO, Content & Digital Marketing clients for some time.
Thank you Google team for posting this explanation to help more folks understand the method behind your madness...I mean genius : )
I had written about when and why Google changes Titles back in December. So it's nice to see confirmation that Title changes are done for relevancy and CTR.
I would enjoy hearing more about how you identify and measure these changes.
Would be good to opt out of this as my title is my title! It's like Waterstones renaming books depending on the search queries. If searching for a book about hobbits should The Lord of the Rings be changed to A Tale of Two Hobbit Heroes or something???
If you think about a relevant page title as a measure of quality, then it makes sense to have a page title that reflects the content of your page.
Never duplicate titles though, or else Google will assign a more appropriate page title for you, like AJ pointed out.
We wrote an article about the title tags and Google just came to confirm that on this article. You can view our article on the link below
http://www.neo.co.mu/webdesignnews/detail.php?news_id=143
what are the rules followed when replacing unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles ? From where you get the alternative titles? - thanks
Hi Pierre Far,
What I hope the "ALT" text added to an embedded image also should be considered as snippets.
Is it possible?
mdr, ou est ce générateur ?
May be one more point need to be added in this post that is:
[ Google algorithms also generates title on the basis of your "page name" and the "anchor text" through which you have got the maximum link for that particular page. ]
So basically you're saying "write better titles" or we will. I like it! And love the hope to get rid of all the "home" titles. However, there are times in which we might try to write titles to match themes and common keywords, then try to get client to be more user focused with that page content (in that order). So trying to get a client to say "bubble bath" rather than "foaming gel," but the titles happen first. Thanks for a good tweak.
I wish I could understand what you have been explain. I try so many way to get my title appropriate to the search engine but still failed.
nice blog!
welcome to me!!
Every so often Google News will display the author name as the page title of articles on my Joomla site. This happens even though I've done nothing differently with the meta descriptions for the article in question and I can't figure out why this is happening. Any ideas?
Thanks for the info I just went through and changed my title, It was very long and was more of a description. I didnt realize how the search engines use this info.
Thx firefightersafe.com
Very Informative
Thanks to Google & Matt
Good Google. Thanks guys for letting us know about the Alternative Title.
Hope this will help to fulfill the needs of Title and make more customize searches.
i think is quite good for the end users and the webmasters. A win win solution. Kodus!
high time a post came out about this. And I thought I have messed up & only 1-word title is reflecting in the SERP's. it's Google! **sigh** whats happening in my case is that the title reflects the keyword a user searches, not even Brand name. Keyword displayed in search result over brand name. :/ affecting my CTR.. is google listening...
I would like to suggest that Google will provide an option to add alternative Title Meta tags
and run a real A/B testing so eventual only the title with the better CTR will remain...
This might improve the quality of the title meta tag of many web pages.
Hi Google -
Great official commentary from Google (its a bit advanced) on writing better Titles for SEO.
Hi Google, thanks for sharing this post. I am newbie in seo field and by seeing your article quite confident about, how to choose a title for a page.
The strict summary of yours post is as it follows:
- write unique, descriptive page titles;
- titles must be relevant to the page content, otherwise alternative titles will be generated;
- do not use unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles.
It sounds right and reasonable. Thanks for this advise.
Hi, I am just wondering if Google takes up the responsibility to display better Titles, then is it a signal for the webmasters about not worrying about the title tag and pay attention to other things
Funny that Google should discuss page titles after I found this on their External Keyword tool this morning...
http://pic.twitter.com/4b50Fufv
Hi, any idea why our site www.cpg.org now shows "Untitled" in search results even tho our html source uses only 1 title tag "Church Pension Group". Thats was fine until this week - smells like a bug as none of our site's pages are showing up. Thanks for shedding some light on this.
I think if you write different and unique titles Google will not to make change in them
That I guess Google will do.
Or minor changes
What if i don't want Google to auto-suggest page titles? I would like to display my created page titles in SERP's. Is there a way to stop Google auto generating titles like DMOZ?
did u check my site please and tell me how it became suitable for adsense
www.gossipstyles.com
please
Pierre Far writes: “Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML. For example, a title using simply the word "Home" is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.”
Matt Cutts writes: “While we can't manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the title and snippet displayed for your pages by following the general guidelines below".
Please, which is it? They DO provide alternative titles in search results, or they DON'T/CAN'T.
Thank you.
Is it possible to stop this override? We have seen HUGE drops in traffic because of this, same ranks but 30,000 drop in visitors and actually a subsequent drop in rank... we have re-written titles 3 times and still not been able to get rid of the garbage Google has put up. We have found that it is from an internal linking structure that the Title is being generated, we have a link on 100,000's pages saying 'other' to the page - "'other' - Brand" is the context Google is using. We cannot change 100,000 pages of links, so how can we stop this?
Ben
Can any one answer my question: Why Google display url as snippet title.
Is there any one can answer my question, Why Google display url as my snippet title.
Hmm, many of my pages are getting the titles replaced by google ... even though they are optimised to reflect the page content? why is that?
i also have one website http://unitedworld.in/ when i search this website in Google search , title tag is not displaying in search only name Unitedworld School of Business is showing . what may be reason of it ?
While searching with my website name in google, it displaying the website with website name like 'example.com' not showing the actual title of the page. Can you please help me to sort out the issue? Thanks.
Glad I found this post.
On our corporate site, Google is often changing out our title (which is fine) but you guys are mangling our brandname when you do this.
Our brand name is trademarked in ALLCAPS but you guys rewrite it as Allcaps, which makes it look like we've done some messy coding and we're not aligned. (BTW: Wikipedia also has it wrong, despite my correcting it - if you're pulling from there, shame!)
How do we get you guys to be aligned on how our brand is supposed to be displayed in the title tag?
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