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Google rewrites many page titles
51–60 of 273 posts
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#52> 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 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
Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated ] even if the article content wasn't updated.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#53It'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.
The waste is the point. One might as well wonder why I keep my password secret and force hackers to break it.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#54It'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 w…
At least in the case of gaming, I think (some) people actually enjoy this aspect. It's a waste in a lot of systems, but in an "art", I think it can elevate the experience, at least for certain games and genres.
An interesting inverse of the norm is the Roguelike ADOM. Most similar games from the same time period like Angband, Nethack, and DCSS were open source, while ADOM was a free, but proprietary game. The other games' secrets were open-book, with no real secrets to speak of as the source code is scoured by players. ADOM remains sort of interesting to me as there are red herrings in even the machine code to throw off reverse engineering, and genuine secrets that open source games simply can't have. I've always appreciated that you can't simply look at the source to know everything, anyway.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#55tldr: Google sometimes uses headings instead of titles. Match them to prevent title rewrite; stop using long, verbose titles
Related, but I dislike when I'm bookmarking a page and the title is one word - the name of the product or the company. It makes it hard to search for it later.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
(⁽₍⟮⦅⸨﴾﹙（｟
POV: your about to learn the most esoteric LISP yet
Common Lisp isn't that esoteric!
(defun fun-reader (stream arg)
(declare (ignore arg))
(read-delimited-list #\⸨ stream t))
(set-macro-character #\⸨ (get-macro-character #\) nil))
(set-macro-character #\( #'fun-reader)
(defun square (x⸨
(* x x⸨⸨
(square 10⸨
; => 100Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#57tldr: 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.
No thanks, as a Google user, I’m happy that Google is descriptive.
Ideally, Google tells me what the page actually contains. I.e. if you title the page “Top TVs of 2022” and you’re reviewing cars, then it titles it appropriately. Google can’t do that right now, but every step closer is a good thing for me.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#58Ok... owning couple of dozen sites all submitted and fully indexed, I have never seen even single URL re-written. Does this really happen?
Google claimed that the original is used "more than 80% of the time" when announcing the change[0].
Combining this rate with the rate seen by the article (rewritten 61% of the time, on the subset of 81,000 URLs they were interested in), I'd guess that some websites see a lot of rewrites and many other websites see none at all.
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-...
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#59It'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.
OP is an SEO company. Wasting human energy is what they do.
Re: Google rewrites many page titles
#60Earlier 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…
I really wish browsers would stop shrugging their shoulders at bad markup and display blank pages with errors in the consoles or even visible in the rendered page. It would force devs to clean up their act. But as long as 1 browser vendor doesn't do it, the end users will all just assume the strict browser is broken since there is another browser that does "work".