Google Shown to Rewrite Over Half of those Carefully Crafted Title Tags
March 11, 2022
Apparently Google is taking liberties with one of search engine optimizations’ favorite tools. SEO software vendor Zyppy shares its own recent research in the blog post, “Study Shows Google Rewriting 61% of Title Tags.” Writer Cyrus Shepard tells us:
“Like most Google ranking signals, titles play only a small part in the overall algorithm. But because they are typically the first things users see in Google results, titles can have a large impact on click-through rates and the number of visits your site ultimately receives. Traditionally, Google used title tags to generate the page title in its search results. Over the years, it wasn’t uncommon to see Google make small changes to the title—typically because of length or relevancy—but these changes were mostly minor. More recently, Google became much more aggressive with title rewriting, incorporating additional HTML tags and generally rewriting far more titles than previously. Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. 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.”
They study checked out 80,959 title tags across 2370 websites and found Google had rewritten 61.6% of them. Shepard notes the findings generally concur with those of two previous studies. He explores factors that affect whether Google is likely to meddle with one’s title: character length, brackets vs. parentheses, and title separators. Curious readers can navigate to the write-up for those details. What is an SEO tagger to do? The write-up recommends matching one’s title to the H1 (main heading) tag—the researchers found doing so dramatically reduced the chance of a Googley rewrite. Naturally, the post concludes by recommending and linking to Zyppy’s own title optimization tool. So helpful because it makes ad matching so much “better.”
Cynthia Murrell, March 11, 2022
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