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]

[aristotle]

The basic problem is that google's algorithm does such a poor job of re-writing titles. The concept is valid, but the execution, in its current form, is badly flawed. Too many good titles are being re-written as bad misleading titles.

I'm not complaining about my own situation. Most of my titles are just two or three words and right on the money as far as conveying what the article is about. In most cases google either leaves them alone, or adds a dash followed by the title of the home page. I don't think this has much effect on the traffic to my sites.

But there is no doubt that many site owners are being unjustly harmed, because when good titles are re-written as bad misleading titles, well-targeted traffic to their sites is reduced and mismatched traffic is increased. This could very well be what's happening with timemachined's site, and some posters have also suggested that it might be the cause of so-called zombie traffic.

But it's not just site owners who are harmed, it's also searchers, because poorly re-written titles make it harder for searches to find the information they're looking for.

I don't think that google is intentionally trying to harm site owners, or intentionally making it harder for searchers to find information. But unfortunately that's exactly what's happening.

[JS_Harris]

Can we just write text instead of code yet? I mean, if Google ignores all else anyway...

Domain names are becoming increasingly critical because Google has a penchant for appending them to all titles. A clickbait worthy domain name suddenly has CTR value.

[EditorialGuy]

Domain names are becoming increasingly critical because Google has a penchant for appending them to all titles.

For the queries that I watch, Google adds the site name (not the domain) to the title, although this addition seems to happen most often when the site name is similar to the domain, e.g.:

Domain: Doughnuteaters.com
Site name: Doughnut Eaters
Appended to the Google result as: - Doughnut Eaters

There's certainly value in branding, so it does make sense to have a site name that doesn't look like an SEO keyword-stuffing ploy if it turns up in title line of a search result.

[Nutterum]

@editorialGuy - I have seen this happen often in the traveling (be it business or leisure) search space. Google adds the site name next to the query. For example <eventname> <date> - site name - title tags are very common in that space. Actually thinking about it, the more longtail is the search query, the less rewriting is prevalent in the SERPS. Something worth exploring.