Google changes meta content and specifically page titles when it thinks it can do a better job usually because the creator hasn’t adhered to its guidelines. There are steps you can take to mitigate this problem which largely involve revising your page title to be more in line with the search engine’s way of thinking.
Where does a page title appear?
Just for clarity, when we talk about a page title, we mean the blue text in the search engine results page snippet (SERP) below:
Why does it matter?
As well as appearing in SERPs, the page title is also displayed at the top of the web browser window when the page is open, and social media platforms will often use the page title when a page is shared. Therefore, it’s an important tool in your SEO arsenal and maybe the first thing users read about a company.
As well as just being quite frankly plain annoying when Google changes your meta, it could be detrimental to your SEO efforts too. In some cases, it may not make sense, may not have adequate grammar, proper capitalisation, include your brand name, and can (strangely) still truncate so it doesn’t display in full.
It’s obviously hugely frustrating to spend time creating on-point page titles for a site to find that Google is largely ignoring your efforts. Don’t worry – you are not alone, this is a more common problem than you might expect.
How often are page titles changed by Google?
A recent study by Zyppy showed that the search engine rewrites page titles in over 60% of cases, leaving just 40% wholly unchanged. A surprisingly low success rate I thought?
So what can you do about it?
1. Check your title does actually exist.
Websites evolve, different people load content, and priorities change, which means that human error can play a part. If you think a page title looks a little odd, double-check that your page title has actually been retained by your CMS. More often than not, the wrong information has been uploaded or not properly saved.
Whilst Google looks at the content in the <title> elements on the page it also takes pretty big clues from elsewhere such as the main visual title, heading elements such as <H1>s, other content that’s prominent through use of style on the page, anchor text links that point to that page.
2. Check it’s unique
If you have a lot of content across your site all relating to a similar topic, it’s possible that you may have accidentally ended up with two or more identical page titles. It’s easy to rectify but Google may just be trying to differentiate the two pages for its users. Unique meta descriptions are essential to providing content that is useful for searchers.
3. Check the length of your page title.
Ideally, your page title needs to be under 60 characters to work across desktop and mobile. At this length, there is a pretty good chance that Google will use it in its entirety. There is no exact character limit because in reality, the length is more about pixels as different characters will vary in pixel width.
If your page title is much longer than this it may simply be cut off and if it’s too short, Google may decide to add to it.
4. Check it’s relevant
Step back from SEO goals for a moment and determine whether your page title is truly an accurate representation of the content. Perhaps you started with keyword research but the final piece of writing doesn’t completely match up with the intended title? Google might modify the title link to help users if it determines that the page title doesn’t reflect the