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Tag: titles

  • Google On Criteria For Titles In Search Results

    Google has talked about titles in search results in multiple videos in the past, but once again takes on the topic in the latest Webmaster Help video.

    They keep getting questions about it, so why not? In fact, Cutts shares two different questions related to titles in this particular video.

    “Basically, whenever we try to choose the title or decide which title to show in a search result, we’re looking for a concise description of the page that’s also relevant to the query,” Cutts says. “So there’s a few criteria that we look at. Number one, we try to find something that’s relatively short. Number two, we want to have a good description of the page, and ideally the site that the page is on. Number three, we also want to know that it’s relevant to the query somehow. So if your existing HTML title fits those criteria, then often times the default will be to just use your title. So in an ideal world it would accurately describe the page and the site, it would be relevant to the query, and it would also be somewhat short.”

    He continues, “Now, if your current title, as best as we can tell, doesn’t match that, then a user who types in something, and doesn’t see something related to their query, or doesn’t have a good idea about what exactly this page is going to be, is less likely to click on it. So in those kinds of cases, we might dig a little bit deeper. We might use content on your page. We might look at the links that point to your page, and incorporate some text from those links. We might even use the Open Directory Project to try to help figure out what a good title would be. But the thing to bear in mind is that in each of these cases, we’re looking for the best title that will help a user assess whether that’s what they’re looking for. So if you want to control the title that’s being shown, you can’t completely control it, but you can try to anticipate what’s a user going to type, and then make sure that your title reflects not only something about that query or the page that you’re on, but also includes sort of the site that you’re on, or tries to give some context so that the user knows what they’re going to get whenever they’re clicking on it.”

    Google offers tips for creating descriptive page titles in its help center here. It suggests making sure each page on your site has a title specified in the title tag, for starters. It says to keep them descriptive and concise, to avoid keywords stuffing, to avoid repeated or boilerplate titles, to brand your titles, and to be careful about disallowing search engines. It gets into significantly more detail about each of these things, as well as about how it generates titles when the site fails to meet the criteria.

    The page also includes this old video of Cutts talking about snippets in general:

    Here’s a video from five years ago in which Matt talks about changing titles as well:

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Emphasizes Brands More In Search Results

    Google appears to be taking another step toward emphasizing brands in search results. As pointed out by Gordon Campbell a few days ago, and then again today by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, Google is placing brand names at the beginning of titles for links in search results.

    One example both point to is for York Fitness.

    York Fitness

    As Campbell points out, “Google has presented us with the page title ‘York Fitness: Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing’ but the page title that York Fitness has set is ‘Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing Equipment | York Fitness’ and truth be told, Google’s version of the page title looks far better.”

    They appear to be doing the same thing on a variety of pages.

    While it didn’t speak about the brand-specific method of retitling pages, Google has talked about its process for retitling pages in the past.

    Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far wrote on the Google Webmaster Central Blog over a year ago, “Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.”

    “We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one,” he continued. “But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.”

    “Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML,” he said. “For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.”

    As far as brands go, brands are associated with trust and identity. We all know how important Google considers identity these days. A brand is the identity of a company or a product. Google seems to be be making sure content is clearly associated with the brand that puts it out.

  • Are Short Title Tags More Important In Google Now?

    Ruth Burr, the lead SEO at SEOmoz put out an interesting article, suggesting that shorter title tags may be more important in Google these days. SEOmoz was finding that some of its posts with longer titles were not displaying the right titles in search results. Rather, Google was returning the keyword-heavy part of the content’s URLs as the titles.

    Pretty weird.

    “It looks like having a short, search-friendly title tag has increased in importance – without it, Google could replace your title with just about anything, including part of your URL,” she concludes. “This doesn’t exactly create the user experience we want, and a replaced title tag is a lost opportunity to encourage searchers to click.”

    We’ve been unable to reproduce these kinds of results. We’ve had some pretty long title tags, but they don’t seem to be affecting the results in this way.

    Here’s an example of a title tag, and the way it shows up in Google:

    Title tag

    search result

    Google talked about page titles in search results a bit on its Webmaster Central blog earlier this year. I’m not sure it helps to explain much about this exact situation, but it does provide some insight into how Google handles titles:

    We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.

    Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML. For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.

    Matt Cutts talked about snippets in titles in a video a few years ago:

    As Barr notes, some of Google’s algorithm changes for the month of May had to do with how Google handles titles as well. These included:

  • Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename “tomwaits”, project codename “Snippets”] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We’ll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one.
  • Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation. [launch codename “TopOfTheRock”, project codename “Snippets”] With this change we’ve improved the efficiency of title generation systems, leading to significant savings in cpu usage and a more focused set of titles actually shown in search results.
  • Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation. [launch codename “otisredding”, project codename “Snippets”] When presenting titles in search results, we want to avoid boilerplate copy that doesn’t describe the page accurately, such as “Go Back.” This change helps improve titles by avoiding these less useful bits of text.

    • We talked about these a bit in the article: Google Calls Upon Tom Waits and Otis Redding To Help With Your Site’s Titles.

    Barr’s advice is to use short, but keyword-rich titles in title tags, even when the titles themselves are longer. She’s even going back on “years of posts” and adding shorter titles.

  • Google Talks About Why It Changes Your TItles In Search Results

    Google changes the titles of search results sometimes. This is nothing new, but the company is shedding a bit of light on the process, saying their alternative titles usually improve clickthrough rate.

    Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far writes on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, “Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.”

    “We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one,” he continues. “But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.”

    “Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML,” he adds. “For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.”

    Far refers readers to a Google Help Center article about site titles and descriptions, which includes this video from Matt Cutts talking about titles and snippets:

    In the help center article, Google says to make sure very page on your stie has a title tag, that they’re descriptive and concise, to avoid keyword stuffing and repeated or boilerplate titles, an to brand your titles (concisely).

    “If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources,” Google says. “However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.”

    If you don’t like the way Google has re-titled your pages, you can let them know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

    Pierre Far on <a href=Google+” src=”http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/article_pics/pierre-far-gplus.jpg” title=”Pierre Far on Google+” class=”aligncenter” width=”616″ height=”263″ />

    On Google+, Far highlighted two main takeaways for webmasters from all of this:

    1. Our algorithms generate thee alternative titles so that your page is no longer constrained with having just the one title for all the different queries your page ranks for. This has the nice side effect of making the result look more relevant to our searchers and…

    2. … On average, the alternative titles increase the clickthrough rate on the results, i.e. more traffic for you.

    “The <title> tag is still a primary source for titles we show so all our advice about make them concise and useful and enticing still very much apply,” he says. “Keep an eye on the HTML Suggestions page in the Diagnostics section in Webmaster Tools for title suggestions.”

    Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Are they being improved?