April 27, 2023
According to reports from some SEO professionals, Google has been rewriting more of their titles to shorter and potentially less descriptive versions than what they prefer to appear in Google search results.
An SEO expert, Lily Ray posted on Twitter that “Seems Google has recently gotten much more aggressive with re-writing and shortening the organic title link in the SERP. This includes many of its own pages.” Eric Wu, another SEO professional, added to this by saying, “In a recent small sample, I observed 70% of ‘Page 1’ and 85% of the ‘Top 3’ results were re-written. Plus, in the cases of the re-write, 60% of the time Google is simply removing the branding from the title.”
To provide some context on Google’s history of changing titles, in August 2021, SEO professionals began to notice that Google was changing titles, which the search giant later confirmed. Google explained the reason behind the change, and opinions were mixed as some thought the title changes were better while others did not.
A month later, Google reduced the frequency of title changes, with title elements being used around 87% of the time, as opposed to the previous rate of around 80%.
It remains unclear if Google has made any further tweaks to its title-changing practices this week.
It should be noted that Google changing titles is not necessarily an indicator of poor quality.
