Omikron Media

Google Might Change Your Page Title

An interesting YouTube video with Google’s Matt Cutts reveals that Google might change your page title in it’s search results. “We’ve been willing to show the titles that are most useful,” says Cutts. “Suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’, or if there is no title. If that’s the case we try to show a useful relevant title.” This seems like a good idea, but how often do you see a high ranking page without a title? I don’t think this is something that we will notice much in the serps.

Cutts explains later in the video that repeating meta tags or title tags might also be altered in Google’s results, “we reserve the right to try to figure out what’s a better title, what’s a more descriptive snippet.” Again, this seems like a good move on Google’s part, but how often are well ranked pages using duplicate titles and meta-tags? Anyone familiar with Google’s Webmaster Tools is well aware of the potential serps hit for duplicate titles and tags. This again seems like something we wouldn’t really notice.

Cutts also provides an interesting comment on longer titles, “If you have a title that’s really really long and has a bunch of different words in it, we may still use that in our scoring but when we’re ready to show the snippet to the user we may try to find a better title.” This is interesting news because its long been considered good seo practice to keep page titles under 70 characters. Are Google’s serps taking into account titles longer than 70 characters? It would be interesting to find out if there is any hidden truth behind this comment.

Below is the full video:

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