By Summary
Google has been changing title tags in the search results for quite a long time (since at least 2011 or 2012 [citation needed]), but something changed recently and was picked up by SEOs on Twitter. Eventually Google replied that they had indeed made changes to how and when they will change your title tag to something else. The new changes are supposedly more accurate than previously but only impact 20% of all title tags from web documents, the other 80% are still pulled from the HTML title tag on a page. These new title tag overwrite’s can be based on heading tags, image alt attributes, other text content from a page, or even anchor text on links if Google thinks those might make a better title for the page in their results.
This has SEOs noticably a little on edge as carefully crafted title tags built to both attract clicks and higher rankings are now being swapped out for things they hadn’t really intended to be title tags. The new changes appear to have caught some even veteran SEOs off guard and scrambling for a way to track these changes (even though, again, this isn’t exactly new).
One of the funnier examples is how Google’s automated title tag changing system gets Mordy Oberstein’s current position wrong.
— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) August 25, 2021
- Google has updated their documentation on Title Tags here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/good-titles-snippets
- And started a forum discussion about their system automatically swapping title tags here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/122879386/your-feedback-on-titles-shown-in-search-results
How to Track Title Tag Changes
Europe based Sistrix, an SEO tracking and research tool, noticed the need and opportunity and dove in to create a solution for SEOs before any other tool. Within about a week of the first reports of this issue and inside 24 hours of Google admiting to the new change the tool provider released a new function which allows users to see what pages Google has swapped out title tags on.
Here’s what this looks like according to Sistix. The red words are those in the original title tag, the green words are the one’s Google has added to the title tag. In one of the below examples Google decided a page should be gender-neutral so deleted the word “male” and came up with a word to replace it with (“strength”) in another example Google appears to have decided it was keyword stuffing the title tag and updated it to use a keyword searchers might use to find the page.
Sistrix’s SEO module costs 100€ / month for tracking SEO data.
This is currently the only way to proactively track for title tag changes that I am aware of. In the near future it is likely other SEO toolkits will follow, at which point this article will be updated to include them.
Graphic showing how the Sistrix title tag change function looks via Sistrix from their official announcement