Google broke page titles, finally.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Lets say you really want to rank for '50 best widgets under $50'

The most important place you'd think to put that would be the meta title which is what people see in search, but it's not anymore. If that's what you want to rank for put it in the H1 tag. You could go with 'widgets that live up to expectations' as the meta title and rank for that while still getting #1 for '50 best widgets under $50' if it's in the H1 tag. The change in importance makes sense, visitors see your blaring H1 tag content, they don't typically look for the meta title.

[Dimitri]

The H1 text always had more weight than the meta title. The meta title 's purpose is just eye catching for your SERP listing (when Google is not altering it).

[Abaros]

Basically, Google's job is to match searches with Web pages.

A few years ago it did it one by one, the search "buy car" with page with title or H1 "buy car".

Now Google pretends to understand and tries to match "buy car" with "car for sale".

So if you sell cars, try to make Google understand that your page is for selling cars, title, H1 and whatever.

It's just a silly example that illustrates that the title and H1 don't work like they used to at the SEO level.

[NickMNS]

The H1 text always had more weight than the meta title.

What's the "meta title"? Are you referring to the <title> tag?

The meta title 's purpose is just eye catching for your SERP listing

If the answer to the previous question is yes, then this is incorrect it's actual pupose is:

The <title> HTML element defines the document's title that is shown in a browser's title bar or a page's tab.

source: [developer.mozilla.org...]

It terms of SEO effectiveness @Abaros describes it correctly, Google use a combination of factors to determine topic and intent of the page, title, H1 and the content itself are all factors among others.

[martinibuster]

The most important place you'd think to put that would be the meta title which is what people see in search, but it's not anymore

Oh my god... you finally noticed? I pointed that out over seven years ago.

That's been going on for a long time beginning not long after Hummingbird.

The example you show is a bit exaggerated from what's happening though.

What's going on is that sometimes synonyms and plurals are equivalent to the "top keyword phrase" and so Google will lump them together because people mean the same thing when they type those queries.

Dog Food for Puppies can mean the exact same thing as Puppy Food. By doing this Google can widen the amount of web pages to rank and select the most useful pages from among a wider group of web pages.

I've been pointing this out for sooooo long, that keywords in the title don't always matter anymore...

[aristotle]

I've always used the same term or very similar terms for both the <title> tag and the <H1> tag.

An example might be:

<title> Blue Widgets For Sale

<H1> Cheap Blue Widgets For Sale

This has always seemed to work well for me.

One thing I would caution against is changing either of these tags on an old page. I haven't experimented with this but would bet that more often than not it would have a negative effect on your google rankings.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Oh my god... you finally noticed? I pointed that out over seven years ago.

Cool story, I'm saying they did it again July 1st. Perfectly good titles that Google never had a problem with on sites OLDER than 7 years are being sacked since July 1st. In their place the poorly crafted H1 stuff which reads like "Check this out, it will blow you away"/ is being used, at least for now.

I didn't suspect seasoned webmasters would notcie since they'd never allow it on sites they control but serps are looking a little funny the past few days, mostly for non transactional queries....

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Mod's note... Multiple Google Forum Charter and WebmasterWorld ToS violations removed..

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:09 am (utc) on Jul 13, 2021]
[edit reason] Please re-read the rules... It's been a while. [/edit]