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> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
The ministry of truth. Google shall own all truth.
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It's relatively minor for most businesses, but sometimes it isn't. Inconsistent messaging makes it a lot easier for someone to set up a phishing attack against your customers. My bank uses several different URLs, email sending addresses, and taglines for its services. It's not always easy to tell if an email is actually from the bank. Google adding more permutations into the mix doesn't help.
Google changing the way title tags are formatted on their SERP is not the reason that your bank's customers are falling for phishing attacks.
But it is a factor...
These characteristics all seem like Google attempting to combat SEO-oriented spam titles.
There's an arrogance to this whole process that amuses me. I can picture the dev team responsible for this code sitting in a meeting with the lead dev saying "it appears that some idiot web authors are using titles that have extra information placed in brackets! Idiots. Well, let's brainstorm possible solutions to this problem so we can protect our idiot users from this obvious menace..."
Leaving them alone and giving us back pagination of search results would solve this problem for me. Or they could demote these sites that they think need their titles rewritten in their search algorithm.
> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
Would you be fine with Google changing the work of all authors? Maybe "The Brothers Karamazov" doesn't get enough clicks and Google decides it needs a better title. Or "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" doesn't quite convey what Google thinks it should...
How is that different?
> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
Can't say I agree. Google should be a neutral middle man providing the results as they are found. If they feel the title is not of their version of quality they should rank it lower. I'd prefer the version of title of several hundred million individuals rather than Google's aggregated version. They used to 'borrow' DMOZ titles before DMOZ became defunct. At least in that case it's another point of view on top of thei…
https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questio...
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>I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? Because I've already spent a lot of time on the content, to then just slap 'Lou's Wednesday Website Update' as a title? Because, historically, a title is an introduction to my writing? Any of…
Regarding one of these examples: How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer -> How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated ] even if the article content wasn't updated.
Nobody would write [Tested by novices] into their headline, but leaving out the part in the brackets would leave it open if it was tested by experts or novices. So in this case the removed bit does provide some information.
/s
Seriously. Google is starting to feel less like the librarian of the net (we index the world) and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.
> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
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If Google believes the site is being disingenuous by writing a click bait headline, then they should punish the site by decreasing their ranking, not reward it by keeping it high and rewriting a more fitting headline.
But if the title is spam, and the content is good (this is a big 'if'), the best solution would be to rewrite the title so that it's useful and keep the page at its original rank, based on the content. Ideally, Google would be able to handle all these different cases and just give me the best search results. Now, we all know that's increasingly less true, but in theory that's how it should work.
And yet, I don’t see how Google can automate checking this. It’s possible to add a couple of sentences about how you’ve not seen anything to change your mind about last year’s recommendations. That may well be true. Or false. How can Google know? It just sees content that has changed. So it has been updated in 2022.
The bigger issue is brand trust (as a reviewer brand). The NYT bought Wirecutter, I think, because it had established itself as a trustworthy brand. That’s in direct line with the reputation the NYT wants to have as a whole.