Aug 25, 2021

Your feedback on titles shown in search results

We recently wrote about an update to the algorithms that we use to select titles for search results. The blog posts includes various details on how we generate these titles, why we have such systems, and how HTML from the page itself is taken into account.

We'd love to get your feedback on how this is working for your website, or for a page that you ran across in your day-to-day usage of Google Search. To make it a bit easier, feel free to add your feedback as a reply to this post. Your feedback here helps us to improve our systems, helping to make Google Search easier for everyone, and is always very welcome.

If you'd like to give us examples, please include the URL of the page, the title shown, the device type used (was it on a mobile phone or a laptop?), and any feedback you have on that title. If you can, including a screenshot makes it easier to recognize too.

If you have general feedback about the search results, not specific to the titles shown, please use the feedback link directly in the search results, or, if it's about your website, feel free to start a thread here :).

Thanks!

John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google

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Crawling, Indexing and Ranking

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All Replies (224)

aroder

Aug 27, 2021

Hi John,

We're seeing some odd titles being pulled into the sitelinks.

For example, this page: https://www.gardenahonda.com/service-center-gardena-honda.htm is showing up as "Staff in the service center" in the sitelinks even though there is no mention of "staff" on the page. More specific searches for this page seem to be more accurately pulling in the H1 tag.

This is happening on mobile and desktop.

In the same sitelinks, the used cars page is pulling in a longer "Used Cars for Sale" title, but the new cars page simply pulls in as "New".

Thanks for looking into this.

Maya Koziol

Aug 27, 2021

Hi,

This has impacted a client. The title tag seems to be pulling from one of our H-tags, which are all capitalized for style on the page. However, it's putting it in all lowercase, when we had written custom title tags in title case. We are seeing this across many location pages, as well as a few other pages. Our average CTR dropped 2% in the week after the change vs the week before.

One example is our location page here: https://www.take5carwash.com/locations/columbia/

The title show is below:

The device type used was a desktop on Google Chrome.

Our feedback on this is that we would prefer to see the title tags we wrote in title case show up for these results.

Thanks.

TheMP

Aug 27, 2021

Hello,

One of our latest articles is affected. The search query is KB5005103 and Google has removed the primary keyword from the SERP title.

Original title: Windows 10 KB5005103 (1909) released, v21H1 to get update later

The rewritten title is entirely misleading and it can hurt site's CTR and reputation.

Please fix it.

Last edited Aug 27, 2021

Kasey Moore

Aug 27, 2021

Being able to opt out of this would be swell. I don't like having my titles rewritten and losing traffic because Google has picked an unoptimized title tag.

I'm seeing my feature image alt tags being put up as the title in Google SERPs.

Last edited Aug 27, 2021