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It'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.
Legal processes are enormous wastes of human energy on what are usually negative-sum games.
In only humans could cooperate.
It'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.
> 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 should be a neutral middle man providing the results as they are found. If they feel the title is not of their version of quality they should rank it lower.
I'd prefer the version of title of several hundred million individuals rather than Google's aggregated version.
They used to 'borrow' DMOZ titles before DMOZ became defunct. At least in that case it's another point of view on top of their own (and the site author)
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>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 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 we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically...
> 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.
If you are, rightly, disappointed about low quality results in SERPs, then why not direct your frustration at Google's search algorithm? But ultimately once the algorithm has decided what to return, I don't want any of it to be tampered with. Maybe there's an argument that once you're using a black box, it might as well be the best black box it can be, but I don't agree.
I wonder whether there is a case for legal action here. Google would not have wasted time developing this rewrite engine unless it had an effect on clicks. Whether that is positive or negative, only they truly know. What if it was found that it was, or wasn't, being applied consistently to the results of their competitors, but not their own sites, for example?
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>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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
tldr: Google sometimes uses headings instead of titles. Match them to prevent title rewrite; stop using long, verbose titles
Specifically, make your title and H1 match exactly and aim for a character length of around 51-60.
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.
> Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically...
Isn’t this the intended effect?