Google clarified their documentation on how to control title tags that are shown in the search results.
Google updated the Search Central guidelines for controlling how it displays title tags in search. The update didn’t change the guidance itself, but it did make it substantially more straightforward and removed multiple ambiguities in the wording that made it difficult to understand.
Google Changes Title Tags
Title tags are meta elements whose purpose is to describe what a web page is about. They are also ranking factors.
For that reason, many publishers use the title tag to indicate what keyword phrases they want the webpage to be relevant for.
Google shows title tags in the search results pages (SERPs), which makes using keyword phrases in the title tags even more important.
Google rewrote title tags for years if its algorithms identified more descriptive text than the publisher provided.
The title tag rewrite feature in the search results dramatically increased in the summer of 2021, causing anguish in the publisher and search marketing communities. Many reported decreases in search traffic attributed to Google having rewritten their title tags.
One study reported that more than 61 percent of the search results featured rewritten title tags.
Changes To Guidance On Title Tags
On October 08, 2021, Google published unique guidance on controlling title tags, titled, Control your title links in search results.
The updated title tag guidance changes clarify what they meant when using the word “headline.”
The word “headline” is ambiguous because it could mean either the title at the top of the webpage or a reference to the HTML heading element (H1, H2, H3).
As it turns out, the original version of the guidance used the word “headline” to mean both the title at the top of the webpage and as a reference to the HTML heading element (H1, H2, H3, etc.).
Google Title Tag Guidance Clarified But Not Updated
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the guidance itself has not changed. What has changed is that the document is now less ambiguous and significantly more understandable.
Resource: searchenginejournal.com
0 Comments