Some SEOs are seeing Google rewrite more of their titles to something shorter and maybe less descriptive than they would prefer to display in the Google search results.
Lily Ray posted on Twitter saying “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 followed up posting, “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.”
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
— Eric Wu (@eywu) April 24, 2023
For some history on Google changing titles, back in August 2021, SEOs began to notice Google change titles and then confirmed the change weeks later and Google explained why it made the change. Some thought the title changes were better, some did not.
Then a month or so later, Google reduced how often they changed the titles, where the title elements are used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% from before.
So did Google tweak this again, this week?
Just a note, Google changing your title is not a sign of bad quality.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
