Strange Titles on Google
Image: Google search for social media traffic
Last week I was reading an article at Search Engine Roundtable about Google pulling website titles from Google maps and according to a comment on the post Googler, John Mueller has said this:
“We may choose to replace titles which are repeated on a number of pages or which otherwise appear to be suboptimal”
So is this the reason why I am seeing the phrase Social Media Traffic – at the start of my page title tag when I search Google for that particular phrase? I am not too sure.
My actual meta page title tag for the page coming up is this:
“Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?”
Google are currently showing this:
“Social Media Traffic – Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?
You check the Google cache for the page here and there is no mention of the extra phrase at the start of the page title tag.
Pretty strange right? My thoughts are, if it gets me a higher CTR then I am all for it.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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July 24th, 2009 7 Comments
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July 25th, 2009 at 12:33 am
i’ve seen google doing this with meta decriptions too. so i assume they are using their discretion here as well.
i’m helping a website where they had the meta title and meta descriptions set with the exact same 2 word phrase. google search are replacing the duplicated description and using auto-generated text from the page.
July 25th, 2009 at 10:14 am
@Cracks with description tags its nothing new, Google have been chopping those up for years. It will always try to display a sample of the text that you searched for. If there is no mention of what you searched for in a web page’s description tag then Google may pull the description that it shows up from the main content area.
September 1st, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Yes Google is doing that , Google’s motive are really strange.
September 14th, 2009 at 8:06 am
SEO & SEM are really getting closer together IMHO….
What?! Ethical? The minute you starting counting 55 charcters for your Title tag, that’s when the ethics are out the window and the manipulation begins….
December 11th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
really difficult to understand google strategies.
December 12th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Keeping up with google changes takes alot of work and brain cells to second guess them.
I found this site via the excellent posts on article marketing.
I got tired of wasting my time spinning articles etc.
Seems to be a waste of time nowadays.
keep up the good work anyway
January 13th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Their algorith is too complex to attempt to understand, almost AI(Human Eyes), google only likes unique quality content these days.