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.
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.
@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.
Yes Google is doing that , Google’s motive are really strange.
Trackback: SEO & SEM are really getting closer together IMHO.
really difficult to understand google strategies.
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 😉
Their algorith is too complex to attempt to understand, almost AI(Human Eyes), google only likes unique quality content these days.
Seems Google is taking snipits now from H1 tags and the like to improve repeated/non page specific Page Titles. I have seen this happening across numerous wesites here in the UK.
Well spotted. As long as it doesn’t effect your CTR, no harm done.
Google’s strategies are mysterious their motives are really strange.