Why Page Titles Can Change in Search Results

By Geoff Jackson on 13 January 2012 @ 5:37 PM.

Tags: seo, serps, page titles, page title optimisation.

Recently, we wrote an article on best practices for page titles explaining the importance of naturally writing page titles for your target audience rather than trying to get all your keywords inserted and separated with a pipe.

Yesterday, Google gave their stance on page titles and how these should be used and how their search engine perceives them. We have been advising many [1], [2], why Google may change the title or any of the metadata even if the website has pre-defined these tags for some time now, and as they clarify in their post, if they feel they can use a snippet of copy from the web page that matches higher on relevance than the pre-defined title or meta description, then it is within their interest to alter this to serve a better experience to users of their search engine.

What many fail to remember (or simply choose to ignore), is that everything Google does revolves around relevancy, if you're accurately describing the products that can be found on a web page along with a sentence to entice click through or provide more information rather than a series of one or two words with a seperator - then which do you think a user is more likely to click on from the search results. It couldn't be any simpler for search engines to identify page titles that have only be constructed for the sole use of ranking for multiple terms and this will hinder your site in the long-run. Take a look at our best practices on page titles linked to in the first paragraph and pay attention to it - failure to do so will only eventually affect your ranking and Google will only keep altering your titles - and it's unlikely that their auto based algorithm know what your customers want better than you do so whose to say that what they decide to change your tags to, will maximise click through potential?

About the Author

Geoff is more commonly recognised online by his internet pseudonym 'zigojacko'. He is the Director of Search at Clubnet Search Marketing, founder of The Clubnet Group and has a huge involvement in the music, clubbing and entertainment sector where he also manages operations at Clubnet UK

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