These days, most website owners are well aware of how important their Page Titles are. Optimising Page Ttitles is a fundamental SEO strategy, and one of the very first things that would usually be checked and fixed as a part of a Search Engine Optimisation campaign. But I’ve recently noticed some changes in the way that Google appears to be displaying SERP Ttitles, which may impact on this basic but important SEO strategy.
Page Title Tag
Not only do Page Titles present an opportunity to include important keywords that are relevant to the content of the page, but it is very often the Page Title that appears in the Search results and is the first “touch point” with visitors to your site. A keyword rich, descriptive, and enticing Page Title can go a long way to getting someone to click on the SERP link and bring them to your site.
Traditionally, Google (and other search engines) have been using Page Title tags as the source for the Title link that they provide in their search results (they also often use the description tag for the snippet), so optimising Titles and Tags has long been a simple method that website owners (and SEOs) can use to influence how their pages appear in the SERPs. If you’d like to learn a bit more about the structure of Google search results see Matt Cutts explain an anatomy of a search snippet – it is circa 2007 but still mostly relevant.
Are Your Page Titles Optimised?
Most well optimised websites will have unique, keyword rich and enticing Title and Description Tags for each page. However, in the real world, Page Titles are often not as good as they could or should be.
Frustratingly, many websites still seem to be launched with generic Page Titles – having the same title used across every single page on the site. Sometimes this is because of lazy or ignorant web developers, sometimes it is because the client simply doesn’t “get” the importance of unique Page Titles, or is not prepared to pay for individual Titles and Tags to be written and implemented.
Normally, in Google’s Search Results (SERPs) the Title link to a page would be taken directly from the pages Title tag. If there is no Page Title defined, the SERP Title may even have been left blank. However, I’ve started to notice over the last couple of months or so, SERP Titles that are different to the pages Title tag and appear to have been automatically generated by Google – often incorporating keywords from the page itself.
Site Wide Titles
This seems to be occurring mostly in cases where the same Title tag has been used across all pages in the site, and Google has been pre-pending the generic Title with text apparently taken from the H1 tag.
For example, on a site which uses a generic title tag of “XYZ Widgets and Wodgets” across all pages, the SERPS may list titles such as “About – XYZ Widgets and Wodgets” or “Contact Us –XYZ Widgets and Wodgets”.
Google’s SERP Title generation process seems a bit smarter than just pre-pending the H1 tag, as this is not always done. Common phrases such as “Contact”, “About”, Services” or “Maintenance” appear to be used, but more unusual H1 tags (such as people’s names) do not.
Here are some real life examples. Click a link below to see all pages indexed by Google for that particular site. Take a look at the SERP Titles, and click on some of them to view the actual pages, so you can see the real Page Title and H tags.
(note: above examples were correct as at time of publication but are likely to change if the owner reads this post and optimises their page titles )
Is this a Google Experiment?
It’s not clear how wide-spread this effect is. I am noticing it regularly for Australian sites, but it is certainly not occurring (yet) for all websites with site wide titles. It is likely that this is yet another Google experiment (they are constantly trying out different functionality and features in their products) and if it is not already widely applied – may be soon.
Why would Google be doing this? Certainly not to help out ignorant web designers or lazy website owners, but to enhance the user experience and improve the service that they offer. By providing more descriptive SERP Titles, they are likely to make it easier for users to find the information they are seeking.
What Should You Do?
What does this mean for Web Developers and SEOs? It should make no difference at all, as they should already be developing sites that include unique, keyword rich and descriptive Page Titles anyway, but at the budget end of the scale, where owners may pay for a basic website with generic titles, it could make the use of keyword rich H tags even more important.
If you are a website owner, check with your developer to make sure that you have optimised titles and tags. If not, you should seriously consider having them applied. If you already use an SEO service and don’t already have unique (and optimised) page titles – then sack them and look for a professional search engine optimiser.
If you’ve come across this effect (and like me) scratched you head and wondered what the heck was going on, I hope this post has clarified it for you. I’d love to get a feel for how widespread this is, so if you come across other sites that appear in the SERPs with modified Titles, please leave a comment.
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