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Google rewrites many page titles
21–30 of 273 posts
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#22It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.
it's like calling adversarial ML a waste of energy. we use this approach for the problems where we want to preserve a lot of variety in solutions
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#23tldr: Google sometimes uses headings instead of titles. Match them to prevent title rewrite; stop using long, verbose titles
From a pure HTTP perspective, isn't the point of page titles to be how a page is referenced? It would be an error if a library reported the title of "A Tale of Two Cities" as "It Was The Best of Times". > stop using long, verbose titles This is good advice, but if Google wants to penalize bad titles it should dock their rank, not misreport them.
HTTP actually has nothing to do with page titles. I think web browsers should probably display the titles verbatim, but there may be use cases where they don't, a common one being where there isn't enough space so the title is truncated in the UI.
As for what search engines should do with page titles, it's really up to the individual search engine, I'd say. Whatever serves their users best.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#24Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the website of the company I work for, the title is "tagline | company name" but in the search results it shows up as "company name: tagline". That style doesn't appear on the company website anywhere. I imagine it's Google trying to normalize how things are shown but it's quite annoying. It could potentially break some company's branding.
Shrug. The almost-religious belief in the necessity for ultra-consistent branding within some companies is nearly comical so long as you're on the outside.
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.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#26It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.
Great systems view, that's the general basis of cooperation vs competition. we keep some things secret, stimulating other people to expand energy and think creatively instead of doing it for them. It becomes wasteful when the energy required to produce new information and techniques is impossible to obtain. e.g. in massive inequality: a homeless person just can't gain the skills to obtain a job, or an oppressed population can't overcome the excitation energy needed to free themselves. It's also the reason we outlawed monopoly in the U.S., only to reach the local minimum of duopoly.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a search engine developer I totally get why. HTML in the wild is not well behaved in the slightest. People use title and heading tags in all manner of weird ways. I've seen -tags in the -tag used as headings. I've seen documents where every line was a -tag. You kinda need to make the most of what you're given.
HTML5 has been around for long enough that we should be able to punish sites that use completely bonkers markup at this point right? Since Google effectively has historical archives of the internet they could pretty trivially grandfather in legitimately old content (things they tracked before some date) and just start down-ranking sites that continue to misbehave with markdown but skate by with browsers running in co…
That would be a massive loss, though. A lot of content isn't in HTML5, and a lot of that pre-HTML5 content is precious and valuable.
Google has sadly already tossed a lot of that by the wayside, since it often isn't served with HTTPS. I think something like 80% of the sites my crawler is aware of serve pages over plain HTTP.
In general, attempts at shaping the web through search engine indexing requirements seems to mostly serve to filter out content made by humans and select for search engine marketing.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#28tldr: Google sometimes uses headings instead of titles. Match them to prevent title rewrite; stop using long, verbose titles
From a pure HTTP perspective, isn't the point of page titles to be how a page is referenced? It would be an error if a library reported the title of "A Tale of Two Cities" as "It Was The Best of Times". > stop using long, verbose titles This is good advice, but if Google wants to penalize bad titles it should dock their rank, not misreport them.
The Search Console is great at knowing if your site could use some improvements. They could easily[a] add a mark for “bad titles”.
[a]: “easily” because they already have logic to determine something needs rewriting
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#29> 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.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the website of the company I work for, the title is "tagline | company name" but in the search results it shows up as "company name: tagline". That style doesn't appear on the company website anywhere. I imagine it's Google trying to normalize how things are shown but it's quite annoying. It could potentially break some company's branding.
Shrug. The almost-religious belief in the necessity for ultra-consistent branding within some companies is nearly comical so long as you're on the outside.
Sadly agreed. Definitely not comical when I have multiple times had our marketing department blame/throw fits at the dev team for the site not showing up in Google's search results exactly how they want it to.