Google Rewriting Title Tags in SERPs.
Google has started replacing the title tags in SERPs with other relevant text from a webpage. Google is rewriting title tags for a limited amount of pages in search results, often replacing the text with a page’s H1 tag.
It’s known that Google adjusts titles in SERPs by making small tweaks, such as appending a business’s name to the end. But now Google is overriding titles with different text.
SEOs started taking notice of this on August 16, reports the Search Engine Journal, as evidenced by tweets mentioning a “massive” title rewrite on Google.
The scale of title rewrites is unknown at this time, but it’s widespread enough for multiple SEOs to come across it already.
Evidence suggests Google is pulling in text from H1 tags for a majority of these rewrites.
In theory, it sounds like Google may choose to grab any relevant text from a page and display it as the title in SERPs. That’s long been the case for meta descriptions, as Google can dynamically adjust the description in search snippets to better match a user’s query.
If this is anything more than a live test spotted in the wild, Google should notify SEOs about it sooner than later.
It’s impossible to draw any conclusions about Google rewriting title tags at this time. Google is known to run A/B tests in live search results, so it’s possible what we’re seeing will go back to normal in the near future.
On the other hand, we may be seeing the initial stages of a permanent change. Assuming for a second this is how Google will handle titles in search snippets going forward, it could end up being a good thing for websites.
The apparent goal of replacing titles is to enhance the relevancy for searchers. If that’s the case, a more relevant title could be more compelling to click on.
With regards to how concerned you should be about this update, I’ll point to this guidance from Mueller. This change should generate a few questions about this on next Friday’s Q&A with Google’s John Mueller.
He states that titles are important, but suggests they’re not worth stressing over:
“Titles are important! They are important for SEO. They are used as a ranking factor. Of course, they are definitely used as a ranking factor, but it is not something where I’d say the time you spend on tweaking the title is really the best use of your time.”
For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen any reports of pages with rewritten titles dropping in rankings. So that’s a good indication this change won’t make SEOs jobs any more difficult.
