Title Elements Replaced With External Links

[timemachined]

New or old news?

I'm seeing meta titles being replaced by a related external link on the page.

So if it was previously

Blue Widgets Offers And Sale Items

and the external link title is 'Blue Widgets offers'

The meta title in g is now 'Blue Widgets offers'

Is this because original meta title was too long? It's 57 characters so under the recommended. I'm currently trying to figure out how this can be weighted in my own favour.

I have noticed for some time that external link title has had some effect, sometimes negative and other times positive but I haven't figured out which is the best route yet but this meta change shows at least one could be positive.

For instance, I had avoided keyword outbound links as was seemingly penalised but now seems could be beneficial... I'm not sure changing all other pages from the current 'none keyword' outbound link to a 'keyword' outbound link will do much. Anyone have a trial site they can test it on?

If you do this though and if it was a change made for Mobile, realise that capitalisation is not ensured at the Google end. If it's 'Never eat Shredded wheat' in the external link, that's how it will show in meta title. Which is a little untidy on G's behalf.

[piatkow]

There was a lot of discussion about G substituting meta titles a few years ago but it seemed to have gone quiet and I have seen no problems with my sites for a long time.

[aakk9999]

Google rewriting titles is quite old news - Google has been rewriting page title for a few years now. There seem to be no hard rules as to when the title will be rewritten and what will Google use instead. Here are a few discussions we had on this:

Title in SERPS replaced by link anchor [webmasterworld.com]
Why does Google manipulate page titles? [webmasterworld.com]
Any tips on how to stop Google rewriting titles? [webmasterworld.com]
Google is now rewriting all my page titles [webmasterworld.com]

You can find many more discussions if you search for
site:webmasterworld.com google rewriting titles

[timemachined]

Yes I realised G was using other ways to rewrite the title meta but this is the first time I've ever seen on page outbound link text used. With my site anyway, I suppose I wouldn't notice as much if at all if was happening with others.

I was also wondering if there was an upside of benefiting from G looking for an alternative. Knock on effects. The page in question is fifth. Before I noticed the title change, was on second page.

*And it's not a problem as long as I'm in top ten with the pages G alters this way ha.

[Robert Charlton]

timemachined... I've noticed an uptick in title rewriting in the last few weeks, and I'm wishing I'd noted down precisely when, but it's not a site I monitor closely, so I could easily be off by a month or so.

It was on a site I'd optimized for a number of years, though, and I'm familiar with it. Eventually the company was acquired by a larger company. It's generally dismaying to see what happens to a site under this kind of situation, as the combination of neglect and/or ignorance are usually destructive to SEO.

Some months back, I noticed that someone in the new company had changed all the page titles to match the title on the home page, pretty much destroying most of the old rankings, which had held well because old content and inbound links were otherwise more or less intact. I chanced to check a few weeks ago, and noticed that the inner pages were ranking again, with titles now fairly close to my optimized originals.

I initially thought that someone in the new company was paying attention. Not so. It turned out that Google is rewriting the titles, not exactly to what I'd had before, but close enough. In most cases, onsite navigation link anchor text... from other pages on the site to the pages now corrected... appears to have been one of the determinants.

I can't say from this whether Google has started rewriting titles more often, as our two observations might suggest, or whether we're coincidentally seeing something that Google is now doing all the time.

I should note that in the 4th of the threads that aakk9999 cites above, I discuss another title rewrite I observed on a site that had also been bought by a large company. That site's now been almost completely demolished by the new owners.. restructured in a way that almost doesn't rank for anything. The thread, though, is still one of the more detailed discussions we have on title rewriting....

Google is now rewriting all my page titles
Aug 2012
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4480232.htm
[webmasterworld.com]

[timemachined]

I wasn't going to post this, which I wrote earlier to reply but Storiale on that thread confirmed my suspicions.

Regarding the January SERPS thread comments also. [webmasterworld.com...]

Although initially an observation, the upscale in rewriting meta titles could be mobile related again. As link titles tend to be shorter so would be the natural and easier replacement. Does that mean title field should be shorter and less than 56/60 now so as to keep meta tittle in place? I'm not a control freak but I wrote the title for a reason...

In the past several months I've seen the bigger sites switching to the mobile schema of shorter urls and category urls for mobile and or G choosing to rank them higher. So would be the natural path for titles to be shortened automatically too. Not that I like link title replacement. And I still have long title metas that rank but I'd need to check if they have an on page anchor kw link that G could auto replace with.

For the record, in fifteen + years I haven't changed the way I write and still do the same on page keyword ratio - although with the thesaurus algo I do use more varied similar terms and build in associated keywords in the group to lessen repetition. I haven't stopped doing meta keywords because some say it's irrelevant and I don't link build whatsoever as I hate it.

But this link title inclusion has thrown me a little. Why? Because I don't know whether I should be including an external / internal link on every page with the keyword in and if it's a ranking factor. These changes aren't wholly due to inbound links from other sites as I don't have many.

I sometimes do and sometimes don't include a keyword anchor or mixed anchor including 'click here' etc. but as to whether should be ensuring a keyword anchor link on page for external and or internal, I'm not sure.

A year ago when first noticed G ranks changing based on internal and outbound keyword anchors, I did try a mixture of a page with internal and external, page with just external and page with just internal but it just confused me more so just moved on. As I was sure G was penalising me for simply changing the page links instead of any actual text update.

It got to the point where article link shape linking pushed me down the ranks rather than up. i.e. KW article one, two to one, three to one, four to two and three, five to one and four and so on. New on site articles to increase primary keyword page visibility had no real link juice effect. If anything other activity has had more sway on that front.

But back to title rewriting based on link, if I was a capitalist conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest sites that get high CTR may have title changed so those who pay for adwords and are able to write specific titles, would get the click instead and in turn G increases profits. But it could just be a change for mobile search.

[Dymero]

There's a probably a number of factors:

Foremost is title length - if it's too long, it'll be re-written.

Too many keywords - I've seen some evidence that if G thinks you're trying to use too many targeted keywords in your title, they will rewrite.

Clarity - Don't quote me on this because I don't remember where I've seen it, but I think if G can't determine the intent of the page, they will rewrite. Here is one place they'll probably use anchor text. If lots of anchors are saying "blue widget" but the title is saying "red widget," they might think "blue widget" makes more sense.

As for anchor text shaping, I typically use whatever makes the most sense in any given area. If an anchor text seems to you to be shoehorned into an area, surely G thinks the same.

[Nutterum]

Dymero has a point. One of the tell-tell signs of content without actual intent or focus or content clashing with the title written by the website owner usually results in Google rewriting the title. Don't believe me? Test it and you will see that the landing pages with more blatant content are the ones "picked on" by Google the most.

[timemachined]

Having looked around, I've put this down to penguin parameters and now I have clipped wings on some pages just like this evil lot of umbrella waving hecklers. I am currently going through affected on site and on page links removing any notion of brand + additional keyword anchor links and resorting to 'click here' or some other connected but not near to exact phrase matching + text.

I put links to other articles as it makes sense to put a link on the keyword string so the user knows to click on it. Hopefully everyone in the world will change all their site links to 'click here' see how G manages that!

I'll let you know what happens to the single page that started this thread, was 4th, currently 16th to 18th, if moves back up, fried penguin for dinner. Meta title didn't revert back upon fetch of same url after change of on page anchor external link, so must be a anchor phrase mention from another internal page that changed it.

[timemachined]

I wrote this at the times suggested, just thought I'd hold off a bit and see it settle

Update: I'm having fried penguin for dinner, just went back and refreshed and I'm back in 4th/5th for that page at least. So possibly reverted within an hour - as per G's new method of allowing instant updates on animal issues - that's what they indicated no?

I will now check other pages and see if can do similar if required. I'll update if any further results from change made. The strange thing however is meta title is still the anchor text. Which leads me to question what actually did it. I made two changes:

1) much earlier, changed the on page external link anchor text which was same keyword phrase as page at 12:58:45 AM PST (current PST time 13:34) - 12 hours ago.

After checking 11 hours later, no discernible change so carried through with...

2) an hour ago, went through all referring on site pages and changed the internal anchor link text (which were varied) to 'without widget name' but still pointing back to the page that had dropped in rank.

If it all falls apart in another 24 hours, I guess it will have been 'step 1' that did it and 'step 2' made it revert back, but I don't have patience. If no rank change due to 'step 2' link anchor removal, I'll still be happy. Just don't ya'll go changing your links if in my sector! But you probably weren't silly enough to make this mistake in the first instance.

==========
Edited:

Previous statement

"I was also wondering if there was an upside of benefiting from G looking for an alternative. Knock on effects. The page in question is fifth. Before I noticed the title change, was on second page."

I'm actually really confused now as I wrote the above initially. Trying to recall if historically I was on page one or was on page two. So I actually lost rank since the anchor text replaced meta. Nope, still confused. Ha, going to bed