An Update on Google Web Page Titles Updates.
One of the primary ways people determine which search results might be relevant to their query is by reviewing the titles of listed web pages. That’s why Google Search works hard to provide the best titles for documents in the results to connect searchers with the content that creators, publishers, businesses, and others have produced.
Google confirms it now uses even more ways to generate page titles that are used in search snippets. Titles can be sourced from the H1 tag, any other text on the page, or even the anchor text from links pointing to the page. At the same time, Google claims it uses original title tags in over 80% of cases.
Google says that title tags can sometimes be:
>>> Very long.
>>> “Stuffed” with keywords, because creators mistakenly think adding a bunch of words will increase the chances that a page will rank better.
>>> Lack title tags entirely or contain repetitive “boilerplate” language. For instance, home pages might simply be called “Home”. In other cases, all pages in a site might be called “Untitled” or simply have the name of the site.
Overall, the update is designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages. In some cases, Google may add site names where that is seen as helpful. In other instances, when encountering an extremely long title, they might select the most relevant portion rather than starting at the beginning and truncating more useful parts.
They also add that, “as with any system, the titles we generate won’t always be perfect. We do welcome any feedback in our forums. We’re already making refinements to our new system based on feedback, and we’ll keep working to make it even better over time. Our testing shows the change we’ve introduced produces titles that are more readable and preferred by searchers compared to our old system”.
