This question has received considerable attention in recent years, prompting Google to take action to address it. Indeed, Google has made some changes!
Google Search Central has recently updated a section of its developer-help website dedicated to managing the site title displayed in Google’s search results. The new edition focuses on debugging title tags to understand why Google’s title links may undergo alterations.
Now, let’s explore how this update could benefit you.
How can you control your title links in search results?
A title link refers to the title of a search result on Google Search and various other platforms (such as Google News) that direct users to a webpage. Google employs a variety of sources to ascertain the title link autonomously.
However, do you desire the ability to manage the title links you create?
Influencing title links: best practices
Title links are crucial in providing users with a quick overview of content and its relevance to their search query. High-quality title language on your web pages is of utmost importance because it often serves as the initial information visitors consider when determining which search result to click.
So according to google search central –
- Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element.
- Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements. Avoid vague descriptors like “Home” for your home page, or “Profile” for a specific person’s profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long text in your <title> elements, which is likely to get truncated when it shows up in search results.
- Avoid keyword stuffing. It’s sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the <title> element, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. Title text like “Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars” doesn’t help the user, and this kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.
- Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in <title> elements. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive text in the <title> element for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site “Cheap products for sale”, for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish between two pages. Long text in the <title> element that varies by only a single piece of information (“boilerplate” titles) is also bad; for example, a common <title> element for all pages with text like “Band Name – See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews, and concerts” contains a lot of uninformative text.
One solution is to dynamically update the <title> element to better reflect the actual content of the page. For example, include the words “video”, “lyrics”, etc., only if that particular page contains a video or lyrics. Another option is to just use the actual name of the band as a concise text in the <title> element and use the meta description to describe your page’s content.
- Brand your titles concisely. The <title> element on your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site.
How to Manage Your Website’s Links?
Google suggestions can be a valuable resource to help you understand why Google is modifying title tags in search results. This document can also guide crafting high-quality title tags that are less susceptible to being altered in search results.
For more tips and clarification click here.