A good headline sells a story. The title is the one that will attract the user to click on the link to your site and will interest him in the content itself. Page titles have a big impact on CTR because they provide important context to search engines, but a recent study shows that Google rewrites website page titles more than 60 percent of the time. A figure that can be quite frustrating, given the effort put into coming up with a good title.

Google rewrites 61.6% of titles

Current research at Zippy.com analyzed more than 80,000 headlines from 2,370 websites to find out how many website headlines were used in search results. They found that 61.6% of the titles had been modified, at least partially.

Further examination confirmed that certain components contributed to the likelihood of title rewriting. Google ‘s intent is to provide its users with the best possible title to provide context for what the website contains. If the title is not good enough according to their criteria, then the Google algorithm will adjust it.

This is often frustrating for website owners and SEO experts who spend a lot of time coming up with the perfect headline. Google ‘s changes ranged from one word to completely changing the title.

Factors Affecting Title Change

However, there is hope that our titles will still remain unchanged. Research has confirmed that adhering to headline writing guidelines increases the likelihood that Google will retain your headline, but that doesn’t mean following these guidelines guarantees it.

Titles that are too short or too long

In desktop search, Google typically limits titles to 650 pixels (often a bit more for mobile results.) Titles longer than this are almost always truncated.

But Google also rewrites very short titles.

Of more than 2,370 websites analyzed, Google refactored more than 95% of extremely short and long titles. Page titles longer than 70 characters were changed 99.9% of the time, and titles between 1 and 5 characters were changed 96.6% of the time.

It makes sense that Google will refactor extremely short and long page titles to better understand the content of a website. The ideal title length was 51-60 characters, and in that case they were changed between 39% and 42% of the time.

Google is in the business of providing information, so using too many keywords, the same title for multiple pages, and unnecessary use of brand names often led Google to make changes.

Using brackets and separators

Using brackets, separators also increases the possibility that the title will be changed. Google is much more likely to change your title if you use brackets. The search engine changed the title of the page with brackets in 77.6% of cases and completely removed the words between brackets in 32.9%.

Does Google care what separator you use? According to the analysis, the answer is almost certainly yes.

For titles that use hyphens as separators, Google overwrote and completely removed the hyphens 19.7% of the time – and probably the content in between.

In comparison, the titles that used the so-called pipe separators were changed in 41.0% of cases, which is more than double. Often, Google simply replaced taps with another separator, usually a dash. Dashes definitely seem to be less susceptible to change.

Can you stop Google from making changes?

There is no way to guarantee that Google will not change the title. Google ‘s John Muller said it is unlikely that a mechanism to restrict Google from changing metadata will become available.

However, there is light at the end of the metadata tunnel. H1 tags are an important ranking factor for Google and matching the H1 with the title, even if they contain frequently changed elements, reduced the probability of rewriting the title to 20.6%.

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Source: Zippy.com