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Google rewrites many page titles

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Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#231

Post by [deleted] »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #212
titanomachy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day... [5 pages later] 1. Put rice and water in rice cooker 2. Press "start"

Woah now, shouldn't step 1 be broken up into 2 steps. Each with their own heading and a paragraph explaining how to do that?

[deleted]

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#232

Post by AceJohnny2 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #212
titanomachy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day... [5 pages later] 1. Put rice and water in rice cooker 2. Press "start"

Woah now, shouldn't step 1 be broken up into 2 steps. Each with their own heading and a paragraph explaining how to do that?

What kind of rice? Do you rinse the rice first? How much rice?

How much water? Do you salt the water?

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#233

Post by phreack »

nerdponx wrote: post #15
dahart wrote: post #12

> Takeaway: to dramatically decrease the chance of Google rewriting your title, matching the H1 to the title tag seems to be an effective strategy. Of course it should be mentioned this wont last if it becomes popular. Historically every time an SEO trick gets popular, the rules are adjusted. Even having this article on the front page of HN might be enough to see Google react by rethinking how (or whether) tags in ti…

I wonder if Google is going to try out "AI"-generated titles that are directly summarized from the page content by machine, treating the page title and headings as inputs to the model.

I would be surprised if that's not the case already!

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#234

Post by vel0city »

dheera wrote: post #177
stickfigure wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got this wrong - they should heavily editorialize the titles. Honest titles of search results: * Five pages of flowery text and images before two lines of instruction on how to boil rice * A bunch of tantalizing pictures of exactly what you're looking for but zero further information about it * Product reviews machine-generated from public review sources with affiliate links. Top-rated product has the…

Would also be nice if they edited things to actually be true, e.g. * e-bike with 10 miles of actual range even though they advertise 30 miles * laptop with 2 hours of battery life at 100% CPU usage even though they advertise 10 hours * median $450 flight even though they advertise it as $199

You're never going to guarantee some kind of range on an e-bike. What's the temperature of the battery? Is it mostly uphill or down hill? How much are you going to brake?

And advertising laptop battery life based on the CPU getting pegged to 100% gives meaningless information as its rare for people to actually have their device running at 100% load anyways.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#235

Post by rhizome »

titanomachy wrote: post #206
stickfigure wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got this wrong - they should heavily editorialize the titles. Honest titles of search results: * Five pages of flowery text and images before two lines of instruction on how to boil rice * A bunch of tantalizing pictures of exactly what you're looking for but zero further information about it * Product reviews machine-generated from public review sources with affiliate links. Top-rated product has the…

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day... [5 pages later] 1. Put rice and water in rice cooker 2. Press "start"

and "rice cooker" is an affiliate link

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#238

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ren_engineer wrote: post #91
xg15 wrote: post #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.

Google isn't doing this for the user, they are doing it so Ads are more clickable than organic search, they want people clicking on Ads. I can guarantee they won't rewrite the clickbait ads written by marketers who are paying for space. The result is ads are more likely to be clicked 100% of the above the fold content is now ads on many search terms, Google is doing everything they can to squeeze more ad clicks, not…

"How to growth hack your old website after reaching market saturation"

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#239

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

time_to_smile wrote: post #115
yucky wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

To be fair, The Karamazov Brothers is arguably a more natural English translation.

It's perfectly cromulent English.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#240

Post by codeisawesome »

titanomachy wrote: post #206
stickfigure wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got this wrong - they should heavily editorialize the titles. Honest titles of search results: * Five pages of flowery text and images before two lines of instruction on how to boil rice * A bunch of tantalizing pictures of exactly what you're looking for but zero further information about it * Product reviews machine-generated from public review sources with affiliate links. Top-rated product has the…

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day... [5 pages later] 1. Put rice and water in rice cooker 2. Press "start"

I got instantly annoyed by the first few words of this comment, thinking you’d gone off on some tangent about rice… until I saw the last part. Well played!
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