Google clarifies title tag guidance

Advertisement

Google clarifies title tag guidance

Google has updated Search Central policies to control how title tags are displayed in search. The update did not change the guide itself, but made it much simpler and eliminated several ambiguities in the wording that made it difficult to understand.

Google is changing title tags

Title tags are meta elements whose purpose is to describe what a webpage is about. They are also ranking factors.

Because of this, many publishers use the title tag to indicate which keyword phrases they want the webpage to be relevant to.

Google shows title tags on search result pages (SERPs), making the use of keyword phrases in the title tags even more important.

Google rewrote title tags for years when its algorithms identified more descriptive text than the publisher was providing.

The ability to rewrite title tags in search results has increased dramatically in the summer of 2021, causing concern in the publisher and search marketing communities. Many reported a drop in search traffic as a result of Google rewriting its title tags.

One study reported that more than 61 percent of search results contained rewritten title tags.

Changes to the title tag guidance

On October 8th, 2021, Google released a unique guide to controlling title tags titled Check your title links in search results (Archive.org snapshot of the original instructions here).

The updated title tag guides clarify what is meant by using the word “headline.”

The word “headline‘ is ambiguous as it could mean either the title at the top of the web page or a reference to the HTML heading element (H1, H2, H3).

As it turns out, in the original version of the guide, the word “headline” means both the title at the top of the web page and a reference to the HTML heading element (H1, H2, H3, etc.).

While the title at the top of the page is typically a heading element, the new version of the guide is more concise, as shown below.

Here is the original version:

“Make it clear which heading is the main heading for the page.”

This is the updated version of the guide:

“Make it clear what text is the main title of the page.”

Here is a snippet of the following sentence from the original version:

“…and it can be confusing when multiple headlines have the same visual weight and meaning.”

The newly cleared version:

“…and it can be confusing when multiple headlines have the same visual weight and meaning.”

The original version of the third updated sentence:

“Consider making sure your main heading is different from other text on a page and stands out as the most prominent one on the page (e.g. by using a larger font, placing the headline in the first visible

element on the page, etc).”

The updated version of the same sentence:

“Consider making sure your main title is distinct from other text on a page and stands out as the most prominent one on the page (e.g. by using a larger font and moving the title text to the first visible

-Insert element on the page, etc).”

As you can see, the clarification makes a big difference in making the intent of the guide easier to understand.

The last change relates to the part that describes what Google uses to determine the wording in a title link that appears in search results.

This is the original:

“Main visual title or heading displayed on a page”

The updated version:

“Main visual title displayed on page”

Google title tag guidance clarified but not updated

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the instructions themselves have not changed. What has changed is that the document is now less clear and much more understandable.

Read the newly updated title tag guidelines here:

Check your title links in search results


Featured image: Eugene Partyzan/Shutterstock

You May Also Like