Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Suffice to say, we've heard the feedback & looking into all this. That said, it was never the case that writing the "perfect title" guaranteed that title would be used. We have long used more than title tags for creating page titles. That's not some new change...
Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system. This is because we think our new system is producing titles that work better for documents overall, to describe what they are about, regardless of the particular query.
Also, while we've gone beyond HTML text to create titles for over a decade, our new system is making even more use of such text. In particular, we are making use of text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page. We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within <H1> tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.
Other text contained in the page might be considered, as might be text within links that point at pages.
|
When a search engine does rewrite a page title on its SERPs, that's probably because the SE thinks that its text is more useful for the searcher.If the search engine thinks {vague mashup of searcher’s query and phrase that occurs somewhere on the page} is more useful than {exact title of public-domain book whose text makes up 95% of the page}, I can only say that the search engine is sadly mistaken.
What would be fabulous is a search box that asks "With AI or Without?"
to see just what titles G is displayingBut how can you know? Isn't the whole point that G### rewrites titles on the spur of the moment in response to the current search--not that they have a fixed and constant database of Our Name For This Page?
But how can you know? Isn't the whole point that G### rewrites titles on the spur of the moment in response to the current search--not that they have a fixed and constant database of Our Name For This Page?
I have other things to do, for goodness sake.
Isn't the whole point that G### rewrites titles on the spur of the moment in response to the current search
Entry-level SEO question, is there an easy or convenient way to see how Google is displaying my website's titles?
That's correct but I know by now which search terms make me money (or at least used to) and which don't, and roughly where my sites should be in the SERPs for those terms. I confess though that a particular page is converting well despite the fact that it didn't before but of course G stopped giving us the search terms ages ago - a real blow to SEO that was.
