Title Tag Update

On August 25, 2021, a day that will live in infamy, Google made an update to how it renders website Title Tags in Google Search Results. Since 2012, Google has been testing a variety of rollouts in regards to how meta data is displayed in searches but this time Google disclosed why they made such a significant change and how it will affect SEO going forward.

Prior to this new change the way Google displayed a title tag was primarily determined by the intent of the search query. This new system will display title tags based on what the on page conent is about regardless of how a user searches. This means that there is a higher chance that the optimized title you write (as long as it accurately conveys the subject matter of the on page content) is more likely (about 87% more likely) to be used as the title tag in the SERP.

That being said, if Google does not think that your HTML title does not accurately reflect the page they will pull that title from the page conent. Some reasons for this, according to Google are –

• Title tags can sometimes be too long and keyword stuffed with the mistaken assumption that more keywords = better rankings.
• Some websites simply don’t utilize the meta tag feature and that is either left blank, or their meta tags have generic page titles like “home”,”about”, or the Business Name.
• Titles are obsolete, this can especially happen when data is updated every year but the title tag itself is not updated to reflect the most recent date change.
• Inaccurate titles or titles that don’t reflect what the page is about. This can happen on an outdated CMS where the title tag is considered “universal” and cannot be changed on individual pages.

Google goes on to explain their reasoning by stating:

Overall, our update is designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages. In some cases, we may add site names where that is seen as helpful. In other instances, when encountering an extremely long title, we might select the most relevant portion rather than starting at the beginning and truncating more useful parts.

Google offers some general advice to site owners by stating that they can still follow the same outline mentioned in their help page. This resource offers great advice to anyone just getting started in SEO or just trying to keep up with their own website.

In the future I believe Google is attempting to make SEO into a common sense practice without any specific cheat codes. My advice is to take a look through your website to see if any of your title tags fall into any of the bulleted categories above. If so, focus on writing titles that are relevant to your page content, don’t fall into a habit of becoming too technical and overthinking the process. This isn’t about ranking in the SERP’s its about converting website users and building trust. While these new changes have been largely put in place to compensate for those issues website owners may not realize they are creating, going through and autiing your website will greaty increase the chances that your title is used in the search as that is Google’s ultimate goal as well.