Google Confirms Page Title Update

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public face for SEO, confirmed an algorithm update for how the search engine generates web page titles in search results.

“Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. 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.”

Abrupt changes to page titles were being discussed within the SEO community, with changes seeming to start mid-August.

What’s Changed for How Google Generates Page Titles?

Simply put, Google is paying more attention to what content is immediately visible on page load—the information presented on the screen before any kind of interaction or engagement takes place. The elements that visibly look important, such as headers or other copy blocks that are prominently placed, have increased weight and are being treated in almost the same way as an <H1> tag. Effective immediately, your page title meta tag is nothing more than a strong recommendation to search engines.

Why is Google Using Page Content vs. HTML Title Tags?

Google believes that page titles are becoming too long, are being stuffed with keywords, or are not setting appropriate expectations for search engine users. They geared this update to help users better understand what information lies behind the click in search results.

“Overall, our update is designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages. In some cases, we may add site names where that is seen as helpful. In other instances, when encountering an extremely long title, we might select the most relevant portion rather than starting at the beginning and truncating more useful parts.”

That said, Google has been clear—SEOs should still focus on generating great HTML title tags, which are still expected to be used over 80% of the time. Given Google’s historically inaccurate predictions regarding the impact of their algorithm changes, let’s just say that the SEO industry is taking this news with a grain of salt.

There was also some discussion about providing SEOs with the ability to opt-out of this feature set in the future, but one thing is clear—write your titles to set expectations of what is on the page and not to play games with web crawlers.