Google changes the way search titles are generated
Google has just published a developer note on a new update that's coming to the search engine, which is aimed at making the search result titles more legible, and further optimized to bring up web pages most relevant to the search query.
You may not have ever noticed, but until last week, Google tended to change the titles of the pages showing up in the results of your Google searches, depending on the wording of the particular search.
As of a new update to the way search results are generated, Google says it will stop changing titles depending on each individual search. Instead, it will choose a single title that it it deems the most relevant to that page's content, and keep that title constant, no matter the Google search.
This is because we think our new system is producing titles that work better for documents overall, to describe what they are about, regardless of the particular query.
The update note explains that Google takes many factors into account when choosing what title to bestow a given web page article. "We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page," Google says, as well as "content that site owners often place within tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments."
Text that is anchored to links leading to other pages is also considered when formulating the most optimized page title to show to potential visitors.
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.
When Google encounters an excessively long title in the search results, it will pick out the most relevant portion of the title to show the user—"rather than starting at the beginning and truncating more useful parts."
Google advises site owners to stick to all the old SEO guidelines, as the update is focused for "searchers" only and doesn't offer much in the way of additional optimization for web content creators.
"Focus on creating great HTML title tags," advises Google. "Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time."
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