Google has updated Search Central’s guide for managing the display of title tags in search. The update didn’t change the guide itself, but it greatly simplified it and eliminated numerous ambiguities in the wording that made it difficult to understand.
Google Changes Title Tags
Title tags are meta elements whose purpose is to describe what a web page is about. They are also ranking factors.
For this reason, many publishers use the title tag to indicate what keyword phrases they want the web page to be relevant to.
Google shows title tags on search engine results pages (SERPs), which makes the use of keyword phrases in title tags even more important.
Google has been rewriting title tags for years if its algorithms identified more descriptive text than the publisher suggested.
The function of rewriting title tags in search results increased dramatically in the summer of 2021, causing concern among the publisher and search marketing communities. Many reports of decreased search traffic have attributed the decline to Google’s rewriting of their title tags.
One study reported that more than 61% of search results had rewritten title tags.
Changes to the title tag guide
On October 08, 2021, Google published a unique guide to managing title tags, titled, Managing Title Links in Search Results (Archive.org snapshot of the original guide here). The updated header tag guidelines clarify what they mean by the word “header”
The word “header” is ambiguous, as it can mean either a header at the top of a web page or a link to an HTML header element (H1, H2, H3).
As it turns out, in the original manual, the word “header” meant both a header at the top of a web page and a link to an HTML header element (H1, H2, H3, etc.).
Although the header at the top of the page is usually the header element, the new version of the manual is more accurate, as shown below. Here’s the original version:
“Explain which header is the main header of the page.”
This is the updated version of the guide:
“Explain which text is the main header of the page.”
Here’s a section from the following sentence of the original version:
“…and it can be confusing if multiple headers have the same visual weight and prominence.”
The new clarified version provides the following:
“…and it can be confusing if multiple headlines have the same visual weight and prominence.”
The original version of the third updated sentence:
“Make sure your main headline is distinct from other text on the page and stands out as the most prominent on the page (e.g., by using a larger font, placing the headline in the first visible element on the page, etc.).” As you can see, clarification goes a long way in making the purpose of the guide easier to understand. The last change concerns the part that describes what Google uses to define the wording in the header of a link displayed in search results. Google’s tagging guide clarified but not updated
As noted at the beginning of this article, the guide itself hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the document is now less ambiguous and much clearer.
