John Mueller: Title tags "not the most critical part of a page"

[martinibuster]

When asked what the most critical part of a web page is, he answered:

More like the actual content on the page.

Read it on SERoundtable, Title Tags Not Critical [seroundtable.com]

File this with the hashtag, #CrapJohnMuellerSays

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:41 pm (utc) on Jan 20, 2016]

[timemachined]

Two titles? I only have one.

You expect millions of people to blindly overnight trust G to give them the best results, even if the title isn't anything exactly related. I think you'll find that's why I end up searching on page 3 or bing on some search results as I can't find what I want in the title.

What am I supposed to do, trust G, just click first result and be happy? Or click ten to see if they got it right? Or maybe just the adwords G wants me to click as they have been written by an human. No I look at the title. If G wants to just display sites with shorter urls or irrelevant results, I'll ignore those titles and go to page 3 or 4 or another engine.

The answer to your question is simple, G is a robot and secondly they haven't cracked it yet and I doubt they ever will, titles are too human. Imagine a news article title being rewritten for three keywords, ridiculous. The problem right now is forced compliance. G is ranking shorter titles (the number 6 alone, ranked first for one search unrelated to numbers of 6) and breadcrumbs in the recent update. Basically, mobile.

[glakes]

The problem right now is forced compliance.

Is it possible that in the not so distant future, Google's Scrape Graph (aka Knowledge Graph) will strip snippets of information from multiple sites to formulate an answer to users and not send anyone traffic? With Google lack of concern for copyright protection, unless its their own, I can definitely see this happening. Of course if this were to happen, titles would be useless.

[iwrconsultancy]

Well, this is the issue. You are at liberty to forget about <title> tags and just put a title in the document where it serves some purpose to the site visitor, which the <title> tag does not. However this may impact on site ranking. It may also result in faulty bookmarks.

The robot can only do what it's programmed to do, and if it's programmed to look for a title attribute on an element in the body, it will do that. The present situation has come about through the robot maintainers having to program it to cope with an illogical situation as best they can.

[aristotle]

iwrconsultancy -- I have no idea what you mean by "two titles". My pages only have one title. Unless by the second title you mean the illegitimate title that google's algorithm displays in the search results, which in so many cases misleads searchers and makes it harder for them to find the information they're looking for.

[timemachined]

I use wordpress and an seo plugin, one title which is also h1 so don't have to worry much about that either.

As for glakes, upon hearing that the entirety of human information can be written as dna and comprise of one small room, you do have to wonder whether all this huge internet is worth it's weight or size. A bit like 5000 people at a concert and 500 holding up their camera recording parts, why not enjoy yourself instead and let one person do it and view theirs later. Yes that's copyright too... and as for those on social sites updating their lives every second, no one cares, go tell your mum about it.

If we were under some form of socialism which to date has never worked and capitalism wasn't required to see us earn a few pennies to buy food and housing, there would be no problem with one account of everything wiki edited and a single product sold in one place from one shop the world over.

But, and although I know the day could come, when there is no such thing as money or paid work and instead simply societal standing and responsibility and everything is free and materialised from atoms, no G won't be stealing content that way. Even though it currently aggregates data on certain topics but surely they have permission.

Several million people, possibly more, rely on Google for their employment status. G can quite easily put SEO people out of business and eradicate an industry, put most affiliates out of business - many already have, newspapers out of business and any kind of service or micro industry built around the internet put into decline.

And to turn that on its head, G also has the power to see several million more people employed just by inventing new ways of doing things - a bit like, say, a paid for energy report on homes in the UK for instance that created jobs overnight and a new industry and more importantly, new government taxes. Since scrapped I believe.

While we pontificate about titles, there is the bigger picture that what most of us do is waste our lives away, several thousand of us trying to beat Bert's Widgetry and sell cheaper widgets because they're cheaper, delivered faster or have the nicer smiling staff or better seo.

I do wonder who are the robots sometimes as I write yet another page that others have written in a similar form 243,000 times before but I'm more clever as I got a social backlink, used the right keyword and phrase structure and a 12 year old domain with more relevancy and niche word count, oh and put the keyword in the title ha.

Copyright would allow G to lift information to make a new offering, but I don't think website owners will be happy in the pleasure toy relationship breaking down.

[EditorialGuy]

Here's an idea: Google could introduce a meta statement that allowed site owners to say, if they wished, "I don't want my titles rewritten." When Google wanted to rewrite a title but saw the "NoTitleRewrite" statement, it could honor the request by removing the page from the search results. Both parties would win: The site owner (by not having the title rewritten), and Google (by not having to clutter its search results with a title that was spammy, unwieldy, or a poor match for the query).

[timemachined]

You really love Google.

I'll state it again, the title G rewrote; this was what was on the post

at least 3% kw phrase match
1000 words
surrounding synonyms
on topic + related
keyword anchor on page
keyword anchor incoming internal
meta keyword
meta title: "topic verb brand1word brand2word brand3word kwphrase synonym kwend"
meta description
keyword image urls

If it was any more on topic it would be a nutty chocolate bar. It was under 60 characters, wasn't spammy as made grammatical sense but yes used two synonyms. I don't understand why you love G so much. If it beat up its wife, would that be wrong or perhaps she's just talking too much and over elaborating.

[Nutterum]

@timemachined - actually @EditorialGuy has a valid point. If you so much do not want the "mislead and crap" traffic coming from Google and at the same time wish your page to appear on the results when it's most relevant with the exact title you want, then in all other instances it should not appear. You will appear on the traffic relevant to you and Google will do a better job at serving better result pages without your site in them.

See the door opens both ways. If you say that the traffic Google funnels to you is bad and non-converting and you believe part of the problem is the title rewrite, that means Google did not do a good job at placing your website in the correct spot, or showing your website one too many times to searchers who obviously do not want anything to do with your website and product. Now this also means your website is crap as well and should be shown only to visitors who can see value in it. But, then don't come here crying about losses in traffic. The ball is in your court. If you have traffic that does not convert, it is YOU who has to find out why then find out how to make those visitors convert and ultimately change your website to cater for them. Building a website you THINK matches certain potential audience, does not mean that it does, nor means Google will auto-magically send traffic just because you want to. You are not entitled to anything and it is your job to find your place on the search engine as much as it is the search engine duty to find a place for you.

[timemachined]

I never said anything about traffic or it not converting where did you get that from? I'm only saying G shouldn't rewrite the title for whichever reason. The only job the search engine has is to maximise click through to advertisements. The rest is dressing it all up to make the websites they nick content off and use to garner traffic as distanced and as happy as possible.

What's wrong with you and all your accusations? I write good content and until which time G actually proves that you can write content without putting in keywords on purpose, I'll have to play the game. I am quite happy writing content but it has to earn money.

It's all well and good saying 'things not strings' but it's plumbing ballcocks. I wrote content in 2003 it ranked, I wrote content in 2009 it ranked, I write content now and it ranks amongst sites with thousands of backlinks and millions of followers and I don't link build. I haven't changed the way I write much either in that time.

As for building a website thinking it matches a certain niche. Well if all the articles are about a topic, are well written, have well placed keywords across the entire site, is all encompassing, covers related topics, overlaps into other fields, answers questions, has guides, video etc. your very correct, G won't auto magically send traffic, IT WILL send traffic. Duh...

Google is not God, I can argue the point as much as I want, but I don't know where you're getting all your supposition from. For some reason you think I'm some spammer that crams keywords in and that I should expect my lot. You're very wrong. Base your replies on fact please, this is the first time I heard German based rumours about my website's poor writing ha. G rewrote the title including the keywords taken from links or on page text for an exact search that already had the keyword sin the title. And that page is still in first for the term.

Yes I'm not entitled to anything but nor should G change the titles I write. It's an unwritten contract between two parties. Yes G is big enough to do what it wants and at will regardless of the view of one website owner, that doesn't mean everyone will agree with what G does. And may be it's my mistake but all the time we're giving G our analytics, we're shooting ourselves in the foot as I'm telling G how not to convert visitors and push them towards adwords instead.

G is not your friend, no big business is.

[Robert Charlton]

iwrconsultancy wrote...

You are at liberty to forget about <title> tags and just put a title in the document where it serves some purpose to the site visitor, which the <title> tag does not.... // ....The robot can only do what it's programmed to do, and if it's programmed to look for a title attribute on an element in the body, it will do that.

iwrconsultancy, there seems to be some confusion in this thread over your comments suggesting that two titles (one in the head and one in the body) are useful to Google and can be implemented.

Just to clarify, it's pretty well agreed that the title attribute, which you mention above, is not used for ranking purposes. I've tested it occasionally to confirm, and Google does not appear to rank a title attribute in any way, even for unique words. Title attributes are used for tool tips, and that's pretty much it. As there are possibly a great many title attributes on a page, it would be difficult to decide which one would replace the title element. We're talking about both HTML4 and HTML5.

I realize that you said "if" a robot is programmed "to look for a title attribute on an element of the body", but since title attributes historically have not been intended as page titles, it's unlikely that this can or will suddenly change.

Also, to clarify "title" terminology a bit further, the title "tag" that we're discussing is technically called the title element, but title "tag" has become generally acceptable in common usage. Its syntax is....

<title>Title text here, short and to the point</title>

There is also something else called the "meta" title... and, to clarify, we are not talking about the meta title in this discussion either, even though the title element is up there in the head section with what are commonly called meta tags. The syntax of the meta title is similar to the syntax of the meta description...

<meta type="title" content="Some words describing the page">

Don't use this syntax. Worth noting that tedster mentioned back in 2007 that Google ignores it. (I'm not linking to that old discussion, btw, because a great deal else has changed regarding titles).

In any event... Google is changing titles because Google is rewriting queries with Hummingbird and RankBrain, and because the algo is increasingly using semantic connections and statistical analysis rather than simple keyword matching, and because Google is looking at relevance under a much more complex set of conditions than keyword matching can accomplish.

As EditorialGuy and Nutterum point out, for Google to leave titles as they are, even when they're well written and not spammy, would frequently be misleading. Not always so, but frequently, and it will become more frequent. The algo is no longer strictly about title keyword matching. It evaluates the page and how the page fits into the site it's on, and looks at that together with its context on the web.

My mentioning of title rewriting early on in this discussion was simply to illustrate what I see as ongoing deprecation of the title. Complaining about title rewrites for 100+ posts was not intended to be the core topic of this discussion.

If someone wants to start a different thread on why their particular site is being treated unjustly... and I'm thinking of timemachined in particular... I recommend he do that. timemachined, IMO, to justify your arguments that are taking this thread completely off topic, you are looking at elements, some of which have not been considered ranking factors for a dozen years.

Eg, timemachined posted...

meta keyword

Seriously?

meta title: "topic verb brand1word brand2word brand3word kwphrase synonym kwend"

In my experience, this is too many keywords.

But, too many keywords or not, Google is going to rewrite titles. Your complaints are not going to change that. While we can learn a bit from your dissatisfaction, we can't let it dominate the thread. So, please back off... this thread is not primarily about your site's problems.

There have been many, many Google algo changes over the past few months and years, some suggested very clearly by the contents of the Human Rater Handbook, and now made possible by new Google infrastructure... and by new major components of the algo which have been developed to accomodate the new input.

IMO, they are all interrelated, and it seems a real waste not to discuss them. A better grasp of the factors involved would help us all build better sites.

[mrengine]

In any event... Google is changing titles because Google is rewriting queries with Hummingbird and RankBrain, and because the algo is increasingly using semantic connections and statistical analysis rather than simple keyword matching, and because Google is looking at relevance under a much more complex set of conditions than keyword matching can accomplish.

If re-writing our titles is the reason why we are seeing non-converting and high bounce rate zombie traffic, as I suspect may be, it would be better to let us title our own pages and not some AI bot that is in its infancy.

[aristotle]

If someone wants to start a different thread on why their particular site is being treated unjustly... and I'm thinking of timemachined in particular... I recommend he do that. timemachined, IMO, to justify your arguments that are taking this thread completely off topic, you are looking at elements, some of which have not been considered ranking factors for a dozen years.

There is clearly an injustice being done to many site owners. But it's not just site owners that are being harmed, it's also searchers. This is because searchers look at the re-written title in the SERPs to help them decide whether to click through to a page or not. When the re-written title is misleading, as it so often is, then searchers waste their time going to a page that doesn't have the information they're looking for.

So it's not just site owners that are being harmed, it's also searchers.

[EditorialGuy]

It's an unwritten contract between two parties.

Imaginary "unwritten contracts" aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.

Again:

If you link to one of my pages, are you obligated to use the text between my <title> and </title.> tags as your anchor text? Of course not. Neither is Google or any other search engine.

It's that simple. End of story.

[aristotle]

it would be better to let us title our own pages and not some AI bot that is in its infancy.

That's a very good point.

In some cases, the re-writing of a page title could be beneficial to searchers, if it helps them find the information they want. But in fact it often has the opposite effect, making it harder for searchers to find what they want.

The basic problem is that the title re-writing part of google's algorithm makes so many mistakes, replacing good titles with bad misleading titles.

So if google really cares about the searchers experience, they need to improve this part of their algorithm to the point where it doesn't make so many mistakes. If they would do that, then most of the complaints would disappear. But as it stands now, with so many mistakes being made, the complaints are fully justified.

[randle]

It's that simple.

IDK, is it though? Clearly there has been a significant change in just what the "title" of a page is. At one point back in the day, the title was created by the person that owned the site, the words were entered into the tag so it became part of the overall display in the SERP; title, description & url. That was the de facto arrangement for a lot of years, and for anyone who has been at this a while creating titles was a skill that produced results if done well both in terms of ranking and click through rate.

Obviously much has changed; the ranking impact of the title was lessened and Google became more and more inclined to "re-write" the title to one their algorithm determined was more indicative of what the page was about which certainly all makes sense.

We can argue the two basic positions about the merits of titles being re-written back and forth all day long; 1) "its their search engine, their offering your site to their visitors for free, and they don't want users becoming frustrated by clicking through to a page that is not as represented by the title that was displayed. 2) "Its my site, I made that title and changing it is akin to the slap in the face it would be to Tolstoy if Google renamed his novel "War and Peace" to "Can't We All Just Get Along".

As far as the title goes its time to accept the fact you have minimal control over the words Google is going to display above the snippet in their results. Nothing is going to change that so if you want to play ball on Google's field you just have to factor it in to your overall strategy.

As far as the meta description is concerned it has been going the way of the title with more reliance by Googles algorithm on grabbing sections of text off the page as opposed to whats in the tag. Theres no doubt in my mind Google's algorithm can describe what that page is about better than you can through use of the tag, or from parsing bits of sentences off the page. The question you may want to start mulling over in your spare time is what will your feelings be when they begin doing this with sentences that you did not place on the page. "Never going to happen!" you say? It can and will.

Of course they would never alter the url, thats as hard a piece of information as you can get - the sites domain. That seems safe for now, as long as I'm viewing things on my desk top - odd though the other day when looking at results on my tablet things on that front seemed a bit murkier.....

Control of the title thats displayed in the results is gone and its not coming back which I think most are accepting of, (maybe not crazy about the idea, but can live with it and do see some logic to it).

After the title, is there anything about the SERP display for your web properties that you would consider absolutely wrong for Google to freely alter?

[aristotle]

randle -- what about the searchers who use google? You didn't mention them at all.

Most of the posters in this thread keep focusing on the injustice that google's title re-writing does to site owners, but nobody wants to talk about the problems it creates for searchers in making it harder for them to find the information they want.

[timemachined]

I'll bow out but to EG, yes you can link to my site any which way but you're not lifting my text to do so, nor are you doing so with millions of websites. Without our assistance en masse, Google wouldn't exist. So Monarchies (wrong example perhaps) and Ratners rarely go the way of the dinosaur, that's not to say G can't make a big mistake and see everyone refuse G access.

However impossible and improbable that may seem. If some rich chap comes along and invents something entirely new, G might be stuck with an alphabet holding company. Which is why G uses its billions wisely to buy out any future competitor. As if an AI company cracks it, G is history, however notable.

If G is reading this, at the very least get an engineer to capitalise the rewrites, you bunch of hippy code writers.

[randle]

what about the searchers who use google? You didn't mention them at all.

Good point - personally i'm ok with the title re-writes. I get why they do it and I would imagine for the majority of searchers it does help them.

But, you can't deny its a bit of a slippery slope. The "editorializing" is going to increase and my question to you is, if your ok with the titles being altered, is there any element of the SERP display that you feel is off limits to that sort of treatment?

[fathom]

Injustice implies unfair... When everyone is stuck with the same rule you can hardly say it is unfair. Sound more like policy.

Also, whether a title element is rewritten or not you really can't say searchers found what they wanted simply by reading a title element, why would they click through to your page if they actually already had what they wanted.

Embracing change makes you better, procrastinating makes you stale.

[randle]

When everyone is stuck with the same rule you can hardly say it is unfair. Sound more like policy.

Agreed, nothing unfair about any of this. But, just because something is "policy" doesn't mean your devoid of some type of thought about it.

Heres a question for you;

If Google sent out a tweet stating their new policy was that they would no longer show the url in their SERP results, it would be replaced by "Click Here"; what would your honest reaction be as your reading that?

[EditorialGuy]

If Google sent out a tweet stating their new policy was that they would no longer show the url in their SERP results, it would be replaced by "Click Here"; what would your honest reaction be as your reading that?

I can't see them replacing the URL with "Click here." If they were going to ditch the URL, it would make more sense to simply link from the title.

What would my honest reaction be? I'd be neutral. A title like "Widgetco WM-1 Thingamabob - Guy's Gadgets" or "Somewheresville Public Transportation - VisitElbonia" would work just fine. The site name or brand is more important than the URL.

[tangor]

The only job the search engine has is to maximise click through to advertisements.

Probably the most mind boggling statement so far!

Despite commentary to the contrary, G is in the business of serving results to queries. Processing those queries to generate a list of urls (sites) for the searcher to click is their attempt to provide service to the searcher interested in information. The information offered is only as good as what G can find and index, massage, and present.

When all the hooligans of webmasteriing (love of keywords to game the system) are modified by actually indexing PAGE CONTENT not titles or meta tags, it makes sense to use that content as the "click on this" presentation.

IF, on the other hand, the content and the title actually match, there's no need for the rewrite FOR THE SEARCHER'S benefit.

Contrary to popular belief, G does not exist for you, the webmaster. NEVER HAS. To G you are incidental to providing search content IF you qualify with actual content. Not all content is equal, though quite a few deny that in hopes of feeding at the trough.

Rewriting titles to match content is not necessarily evil, might actually be helpful, but fully grant it can be irritating to the webmaster.

[lucy24]

Many browsers don't even do that any more, or only display a short snippet in a tab.

Are you ### kidding? As a user, I refer to the page title all the time. How else would you navigate between tabs, or select something out of your browser history? Now, what users really don't see and use is the URL. That's something entirely different.

[fathom]

If Google sent out a tweet stating their new policy was that they would no longer show the url in their SERP results, it would be replaced by "Click Here"; what would your honest reaction be as your reading that?

If that actually did occur I would need to embrace it.

[tangor]

This looks like silly questions from here on out.

Topic is/was Title

Title to me is that part inside head with <title>example</title> which is NOT the actual title of a page (my old moan regarding an extreme error when html was first put together) which is the part that is being rewritten, so it shows up in tabs and all that other lovely stuff.

The gamers load that with all kinds of stuff when all they really need is the actual ARTICLE title which they show as H1 on their page. It's no wonder these things get rewritten.

Or did I miss something in the conversation which is all over the place?

[EditorialGuy]

The gamers load that with all kinds of stuff when all they really need is the actual ARTICLE title which they show as H1 on their page. It's no wonder these things get rewritten.

Yep. Same thing with alt text. And then the gamers get mad because Google pulls the plug on their brain-dead 1990s-style SEO.

[Selen]

It's quite likely that in the future there will be no green URL near the search result and user will be taken to the best result (according to Google). Something like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, but applied to all search results. That would finally solve black hat SEO manipulations and help users too.

[timemachined]

If that's true, best find a relative of Milton Sirrota and ask him what Google should rename their search engine. I'd suggest 'Barry', after Manilow, "just one result, shining in the darkness."

[Nutterum]

@timemachined - your reference is so hipster even 10 minutes of Google-ing could not help me get it. In any case though, I did not mean to offend you or accuse you of anything. We are in a professional forum and I would never personally accuse anyone of anything, par their line of thought. You defended the notion that because one writes good content (even though good is in the eyes of the beholder) and overall caters to Google's best practices, somehow Google if obligated to funnels converting traffic(again converting is another subjective matter!) towards his website. Now when Google does not do this, there is this "sub-topic" of Google is messing up with the idea on how my webpage should be "displayed" on the organic results. Google rewrites Title and Meta descriptions, showing or not showing rich snippets or other meta data and somehow that hampers the converting traffic from clicking on ones SERP link.

You do realize that Google never worked this way, correct? in 2010 it was just easier to rig the system because 1) there was less specific content available 2) one could spam their way to Page 1; 3) Google was not that smart

From my experience with both small, medium and big websites, I have encountered that the more Google messes up with the way I wish to display a given "template" page (let's be realistic we all work with CMS-es) the more something is not done right on my end. Not 100% of the cases but a good 80% I found opportunities to do a better job with the on-page or content elements of the page.

Long story short, don't blame Google when something does not go your way. Maybe there are factors beyond you that hamper your visibility, or maybe there are some content and on-page tweaks you can employ to gain that extra bit of relevancy. Whatever the story, pointing a finger towards Google and preaching that it's their fault will not help you in any way, shape of form, nor will provide constructive criticism needed for other people to perform better.

[fathom]

I'm not so politically correct so I wrongly 100% agree with nutterum post!

Nonetheless, we must be Google FUD Buddies since we see a certain amount of wisdom in Google's actions.