Google has a guide on this :)
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
Google rewrites many page titles
31–40 of 273 posts
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#32It'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.
You see this a lot in gaming too. There are entire sites, devoted to figuring out what various weapon attachments actually do in Call of Duty. If you poke around the Minecraft wiki you'll find the same thing - people working out exactly how fast you can move with different potion effects or how scaling works when leveling up enchantments.
Theoretically, all of this information could be found in the source code, but without it gamers are left to an endless research project.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#33It'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.
Agree. Then you imagine that the entire SEO industry is basically based around the idea that a company has a algorithm only they know, and the industry is trying to reverse-engineer that algorithm. If they released a whitepaper describing exactly how it works, the entire industry would have to change their ways to consulting already public information instead of experiments like this.
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Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#34Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#35It'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.
Interestingly, they are likely to find things that the developers themselves don't yet know.
These systems are large and complicated and time is finite. When it comes to analysis of a written system, there's a lot more time free-floating in the global network of users than there is in the group of a dozen, maybe a hundred, developers who wrote the engine (many of which have immediately been re-tasked to write something else).
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#36> 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.
For the same reason they extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" the content of the page? And the images, and the citations, and the links, etc.
For the sake of quality.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#37tldr: 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.
There's lots of "isn't the point of..." in HTML that actual users have broken. Google (and other crawlers and intermediaries) have to adapt their algorithms to account for that.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#38Thinly 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.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#39Thinly 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.
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Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be fair to the devs, that's an education gap. The response should be "You want us to develop a solution to a third party's whims? Maybe you should try writing them a nice letter about how their representation of our company affects our image; it'll have as much impact. Possibly more."
In real corporations, of course, that's not how it works because the tech people are "wizards" and Google is "part of the wizard stuff," but this isn't a technical problem (and maybe marketing needs to stop trying to control another company; that's no more likely to succeed than Coke yelling at Amazon that they don't always put Coke products at the top of every search result).