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Google rewrites many page titles

zyppy.com

241–250 of 273 posts

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#241

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"

and "rice cooker" is an affiliate link

Let’s also not forget the 55 auto-playing video ads that I need to vault over to get to Step 1. Each one determined to hijack my mouse as I scroll/hurry past and cause a click! It’s like the world’s least fun platformer game.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#242
post #140
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next step, an AI to regenerate the contents according to what the AI thinks I should have said.

Problem solved WRT copyright issues relating to news articles. If the AI derived content (a la GitHub copilot) is deemed as original "unlicensed" content, no reason to force users to visit the website. (it's been a while since the news media and Google had their legal battles, and I'm unsure what the end resolution was then)

artificial intelligence (or at least their corporate puppet masters) are fighting for copyright law protection on insights the AI derives from reading copyrighted pages and content on the internet.

a robots.txt can keep you safe

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#243

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"

Isn't Google one major reason that recipe sites act like this? They've long favoured sites with a lot of textual content (which authors then break up with images) and also penalised sites that people tend to reverse out of quickly? A long story fits that because the majority of people need to read down for the content rather than get their instant answer and immediately retreat.

I find it annoying too, but it often feels like people ridicule the authors when they wouldn't get any traffic if it weren't for that approach. I don't think I've ever searched for a recipe and come across a barebones Gantt-chart-style engineer-thinking recipe plan.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#244
post #243

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"

Isn't Google one major reason that recipe sites act like this? They've long favoured sites with a lot of textual content (which authors then break up with images) and also penalised sites that people tend to reverse out of quickly? A long story fits that because the majority of people need to read down for the content rather than get their instant answer and immediately retreat. I find it annoying too, but it often f…

It's not Google per se but a practical impossibility: it has to rank somehow, hopefully as a human knowing the answer would. They could theoretically hire humans to do it but they won't because it's obviously impossible due to how vast the dataset is, so they use software. Software is still far from human level reasoning so they use metrics. Metrics can and will be discovered and gamed, regardless of what kind they are.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#245
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Google one major reason that recipe sites act like this? They've long favoured sites with a lot of textual content (which authors then break up with images) and also penalised sites that people tend to reverse out of quickly? A long story fits that because the majority of people need to read down for the content rather than get their instant answer and immediately retreat. I find it annoying too, but it often f…

It's not Google per se but a practical impossibility: it has to rank somehow, hopefully as a human knowing the answer would. They could theoretically hire humans to do it but they won't because it's obviously impossible due to how vast the dataset is, so they use software. Software is still far from human level reasoning so they use metrics. Metrics can and will be discovered and gamed, regardless of what kind they a…

As an AdSense user, if you don't use the maximum allowable number of ads (regardless of content length), Google literally emails you to suggest you add more ads. Their documentation encourages you to maintain a reasonable ratio of ads to content at risk of being shutdown, which pushes out page length. They push for unique content (so writers differentiate with personal stories), they measure time on page (longer details, pictures), etc.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#246

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"

No post body was provided.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#247

Thinly veiled content marketing for Zyppy, complete with CTA at the bottom, and mentions of themselves throughout, including: "Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior." Furthermore, "HTLM" instead of "HTML"? Needs proofreading. Lol.

Are you implying that what they're saying isn't important or invalid? Or, what is your point?

"SEO" is pure marketing whose sole purpose is to sell you a worthless product. The article says nothing you will ever need to know and it, and all other "SEO" "content", should be blocked as spam

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#248
post #68
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.

I think that is the worst reason for them to rewrite titles. If they left the title as-is, then I would be able to see in the search results that it was a spammy site and ignore it. Instead Google is helping to launder their SEO and present it as a more legitimate site. If Google thinks a site is gaming their algorithms they should de-prioritize it, not rewrite it.

+1

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#249
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It should do both.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#250
post #90

I had this problem recently, was hoping there was a reasonable fix but it appears not... (the H1 already contains the title) I don't think about SEO, and just focus on useful writing / societal impact. However, I recently discovered by accident that I ended up with a top 2 search result for "platform democracy": https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy . But the title is missing the first 3 words—including the…

Your Google result is actually "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure"
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