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Why is Google changing my title tags? – A new troubleshooting section added in support.

2 min read
Google changing title tags

This query has got lots of light in the past few years and obviously google had to do something that solves this. So Yes google did something!

Google Search Central has updated a part of the developer help website that explains how to manage the site title that displays in Google’s search results. The new part is about debugging title tags to figure out why Google’s title links are changing.

Let’s see how useful it can be for you?

How can you control your title links in search results?

A title link is the title of a search result on Google Search and other properties (for example, Google News) that links to the web page. Google uses a number of different sources to automatically determine the title link.

But do you wish to control the title links you write?

 

Influencing title links: best practices

Title links are essential for giving users a rapid overview of the content and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s vital to have high-quality title language on your web pages because it’s often the first piece of information visitors look at when deciding which result to click on.

 

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?

The Google suggestions can assist you to figure out why Google is changing title tags in search results. The document can also be used as a guide for creating high-quality title tags that are less likely to be rewritten in search results.

For more tips and clarification click here.