{"id":58606,"date":"2022-02-28T07:00:37","date_gmt":"2022-02-28T15:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=58606"},"modified":"2022-02-21T10:14:26","modified_gmt":"2022-02-21T18:14:26","slug":"how-often-google-rewrites-our-title-tags","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/seo\/how-often-google-rewrites-our-title-tags.htm","title":{"rendered":"How Often Google Rewrites Our Title Tags"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anyone who has had to rewrite title tags for whole websites will commiserate with Google’s motivation for rewriting title tags: too many websites use title tags that are too short, too long, meaningless, irrelevant, bizarre, or just plain missing! No doubt Google saw distinctly better usability metrics when they split-tested this change in live search results.<\/p>\n

If this change is better overall for users, Google must be rewriting our title tags fairly often, right? Descriptive snippets do contribute to better search results after all, so how often is Google doing this? We conducted some research very similar to our previous posts about meta description rewrite rate<\/a> and featured snippet length<\/a> to find out.<\/p>\n

We looked at 1,469,373 URLs from over 32,000 keywords and found that Google rewrote title tags 63% of the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This figure includes simple truncation and Google’s more advanced methods. Basically, if the string in the snippet title didn’t match the title tag of the page, we counted it as a rewrite.<\/p>\n

That 63% figure isn’t uniform, and it differs according to device and title tag length. Actually, if you write your title tags a certain way, you can expect Google to write them 39% of the time across devices.<\/p>\n

Background<\/h2>\nGoogle has been adjusting how our title tags display in our SERP snippets for years now<\/a>, but the change Google made in August 2021<\/a> was huge. Not only is Google now writing the way title tags display more often, but its changes are also more drastic than before.<\/p>\n
Previously, Google only had a few tricks up its sleeve to generate usable snippet titles, such as:<\/p>\n
\n
Cutting off text after the displayable text limit<\/li>\n
Cutting off text that’s too long to display, but keeping the brand identification at the end<\/li>\n
Using the H1 tag instead<\/li>\n
Using the website’s brand name for the homepage<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Now, Google is synthesizing more aspects of a page to create snippet titles. Google can use anchor text of a link pointing to a page, category or breadcrumb names, image ALT attribute text, and more. Seer Interactive has a good summary of where snippet title text can come from<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Google is also cutting more text out of title tags. Boilerplate text, brand names, text in brackets and parentheses, and keyword stuffing are all common features Google will remove from a title tag.<\/p>\n
The net effect of this change is that brands have even less control over how their pages appear in search engines. Beyond the basic annoyance of search engines ignoring the effort we put into writing relevant, descriptive title tags, Google will sometimes display goofy and confusing snippet titles, as Lily Ray has observed<\/a> in her blog post on the topic.<\/p>\n
This development is a huge bummer for SEOs, so let’s take a look into some factors that could contribute to high rewrite rates.<\/p>\n
Methodology<\/h2>\n
Once again, our SEO Fellow and hero\/developer Matthew Henry<\/a> provided the data analysis and API wrangling. We used a list of over 32,000 non-brand keywords that have provided our clients traffic, and Matthew pulled ranking URLs and snippet titles from STAT Search Analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Matthew took the first 100 basic organic results from those keyword rankings, and scraped them for their title tags. If we couldn’t retrieve a page or the title tag was missing, we ignored the URL. We didn’t render JavaScript or try to trick firewalls blocking bots. If a <title> tag was available in returned HTML, we took it.<\/p>\n
For rewrites that were truncations, we checked to see if the snippet title was a substring of the title tag. This is a simple check and won’t cover cases where Google truncates the title tag and adds the brand back on to the end. That’s a difficult case to detect, and we didn’t include it.<\/p>\n
We tried to look at the most “basic” organic results possible by filtering out stuff like featured snippets. We aimed for the “classic ten blue links” in our dataset.<\/p>\n
Snippet Title Rewrite Rate<\/h2>\n
Like we said at the top, 63% of the snippet titles we checked didn’t match the title tag of the source page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t
<\/th> Rewrite Rate<\/th> Truncation Rate<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
All Devices<\/td> 63%<\/td> 9%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Desktop<\/td> 67%<\/td> 12%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mobile<\/td> 59%<\/td> 6%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n
Our results corroborate the 61% figure Cyrus Shepard found in his research<\/a>, but they don’t agree with the 33.4% figure Ahrefs found<\/a>. I don’t think we had the same finding as Ahrefs because their methodology<\/a> was significantly different in that they checked to see if there was more than a five-character difference between snippet and title tag.<\/p>\n
The truncation rate is low on both devices. Since we only checked the simple case, that could mean Google is really good at figuring out what the brand part of a URL should be and sticking it on the end after truncating.<\/p>\n
We expected to see very similar rewrite rates for desktop and mobile because Google said their new title rewriting algorithm was based on the page and not the query<\/a>, but there was an 8% difference between devices. Perhaps which snippet title they use is somewhat dependent on the device?<\/p>\n
Rewrite Rate by Title Length<\/h2>\n
One of the most common recommendations I give clients regarding title tag length is to make sure they are not so long that Google will cut off the end of the tag, and not so short that Google will use some other text. Here we see that title tags between 40 and 65 characters are the most likely to be used as-is in the snippet.<\/p>\n