Google Search Central is updating a section of the Developer Support page that offers guidance on how to control the site title Google uses in search results. The new section is about title tag troubleshooting to identify why Google may change title links.

Link to title

The support page defines the title displayed in search results as a title link. The title link usually comes from what a publisher uses in the title tag.

However, Google may change the title link to something else. Some publishers and other members of the SEO community have reported that traffic from search results decreases when Google changes the title tag displayed as the title link.

Title Links Best Practices

Google offers seven best practices for writing title tags that will influence what Google shows in search results.

Title tag best practices seven

1. Make sure every page has a title tag.

2. Write concise title tags that change the subject of the web page. Google adds that this also means avoiding vague descriptions such as homepage or profile.

3. Avoid keyword stuffing.

4. Avoid standard plates that repeat on site.

5. Brand phrases are acceptable until they become standard. It’s okay to use brand phrases on the homepage (like “a place where people can meet and mingle”), but Google warns against repeating the brand phrase on many other pages.

6. Google sometimes uses what’s in the header elements in title links. For this reason, Google advises the use of a distinctive title, which is usually contained in an H1 or H2 heading element at the top of the page.

According to Google:

“Google looks at a variety of sources when creating title links, including the main visual title, title elements, and other large and prominent text, and it can be confusing if multiple titles have the same visual weight and same prominence.

Consider making sure your main title is distinctive from other text on a page and will stand out as being the most visible on the page (e.g. using a larger font, placing the title in the first element visible

on the page, etc).

7. Use robots.txt correctly. Google warns that robots.txt should be used to block crawling of a page. The incorrect use of Robots.txt is to prevent a page from being indexed because pages blocked by robots.txt can still be indexed if another page or website links to the blocked page.

Google advises that in cases where a page is blocked by robots.txt and google cannot crawl the page, that Google may end up using a site’s anchor text that links to the page.

Publishers are reminded that the most effective way to keep a page out of the index is to allow Google to crawl it and discover a noindex meta tag, which prevents Google from including the page in the index. from Google.

Title links are automatically generated from information on the web page itself and also from other sites that reference the pages.

Google lists the following factors that influence the title link that Google displays in search results:

• ” Contained in elements
• Main visual title or title displayed on a page
• Heading elements, such as elements
  

• Other content that is tall and prominent through the use of style treatments
• Other text contained on the page
• Anchor text on the page
• Text in links that point to the page »

Troubleshooting Tips

Finally, Google offers a checklist of things to check that may cause Google to write its own title link.

Elements half empty – This means incomplete title tags

Elements