Title tags have been in the eye of the hurricane since the inception of the Internet. Recently, Google has made a switch where search results have started to rely less on title tags to generate the search results. This has caused a lot of issues in the industry with a huge backslash. This is of course, because of the poor performance of the changes implemented by Google.
After the initial backslash, the search giant made some needed adjustments, and now according to its claims, it is using the title tag 87% of the time. But what we have learned after all of this.
The 7.4% of top-ranking pages don’t use a title tag.
This came as a huge surprise, almost 10% of the top-ranking pages don´t use a title tag. A good 7.4% of the top pages on the search results are not using a title tag. So, this brings another issue… if they don’t use a title tag, what is displayed on the SERP when it comes to this?
Looks like Google seems to be doing something to these cases…
Google rewrites title tags 33.4% of the time.
There have been certain discrepancies between what the title tags say and the SERP title. In these cases, it has not been the same. This, of course, is due to the fact that there are small variations in punctuations and other things. If we were to have 100% matches… then Google will have to rewrite the tags all of the time.
Google has stated, that when it comes to SERP, Title tags are used in the 80% of the cases. Google considers a match when the word order is changed, remembering the main objective is to connect people with the information that people are looking for.
Google would probably rewrite 33% of Title tags.
It’s not a secret that Google has been rewriting titles for quite a while with the intention of facilitating the search process. Previously, it was public knowledge that Meta descriptions were rewritten more than 60% of the time. But now, also titles could be rewritten 30% of the time as well.
Title matching percentage is comparable to long-tail keywords
Google has said that title tags are rewritten no matter what the search query is, so the title could be the same along with all the searches. However, a lot of people have found this is not true. Google seems to be generating its own titles when it comes to long-tail keywords as well.
The importance of the H1 Tag.
When the title tag is not used, headings and especially H1 tags are one of the perfect places to look for SERP title alternatives. A whopping 50% of the time the H1 tag is used instead of the title tag to generate the SERP title in the search result page. But there is more than that, the H2 was used 2,02% of the time, and a combination of both 1,31%. If you think those numbers are not that big, remember the fact that this study was done over a sample of 953,276 websites… so those numbers are quite significant.
Use the Google Search Console to track the changes.
There is an old say: is better to prevent!
BY this we mean to say always craft their best titles possible so Google can use them instead of having to rewrite them. The rewrite will be inevitable in some cases, but it’s up to you to minimize the amount.
Remember, content is still the king!
