Anyone else noticing specific words dominating SERPS?

[westcoast]

For one of our major queries, the word "BEST" is literally in the TITLE of every one of the top 15 results, even though "best" has nothing to do specifically with the niche. This is a new thing. BEST wasn't once in the top 20 before, and now it's everywhere.

Is anyone else seeing such idiocy? Google's AI apparently is awarding huge bonuses to this fluff word in our niche -- is this the case elsewhere too?

Do you have other keywords that are starting to dominate your niches? I guess I need to start slapping on BEST all over the place now. Duh.

[Dimitri]

I doubt that the title of a page, is giving a significant boost in ranking.

It can simply be because, the publishers, optimized their pages, to achieve high ranking, and then optimized their titles to be eye catching, and encourage people to click aka Clickbait.... and they are all practicing the same strategies.

Same when you have tens of sites, with similar titles like "5 best xxx" , "top 5 xxx" , etc...

There are trends in titles, based on the evolution of the users. You can see this when you look at Yahoo News, for example. From time to time, all titles, no matter the theme, will be built on the same way, then the trend will fade, and other trend will appear.

Titles are made for humans.

[robzilla]

It's psychology; the sort of word that triggers people. Same with numbers.

The fact that you're seeing it everywhere just means everyone's been jumping on the bandwagon.

At which point the effect dampens a bit, of course.

So it's mostly about CTR; in the SERPS, on social media, everywhere basically.

[tangor]

Wait a bit---g will eventually expand their filtering to deal with this. Keywords that game the system are eventually dealt with.