Google have made a change to how they generate titles. Should you care?
Google have made what looks like a minor technical announcement about how they generate the titles they use for search results. What does it mean for you and your website? Will it affect what Web users see when they search? Will it affect the traffic you receive?
You can read the full announcement here:
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-generating-page-titles
…and the answer to whether or not you should worry about it very much depends on your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy.
Experts estimate that Google make between 500 and 600 changes to their search algorithms every year. They don’t all directly affect what people actually see when they search though – titles, URLs and snippets (as well as, on some devices, featured images and favicons) are the only things displayed in response to a Google query. You need all these to look their best, to encourage people with a genuine interest in what you do to click through and visit your site.
If you or your Web designers have taken a “keyword stuffing” approach to try to fool Google into bringing you more results than the content of your pages deserves, this change is likely to be bad news for you. Google will now look even deeper into the actual content of your site to ensure that users are not pulled in by seemingly relevant titles of pages that contain lots of keywords but don’t represent the real, readable, English content of the page. This means that you will have less control over what from your site a user sees when they search – Google will find what it deems to be the most relevant content and display that.
If you are an Enterprising IT customer, there is nothing to worry about. Your “Ethical SEO” approach already gives Google the genuine useful content it needs to build its titles and snippets. Every web page contains keyword-rich (but, crucially, not spammy) descriptions (“snippets”) that are readable, plain English, descriptive, and encourage clicking. The “Title” text is always specified in a way that is relevant to the content. So this change won’t affect you – your search results will still appear as they always have, and you will still attract relevant, good quality traffic.
“Ethical SEO” is about more than just good karma. It’s about ensuring you get plenty of visits from people who are genuinely interested in your products or services by giving good quality information to search engines, and writing meaningful content in an enticing way. Enterprising IT clients also get regular reports on how their websites are performing for particular search queries, so they can relax in the knowledge that their customers will always be able to find them. Does your website provider do these things for you? If not, now would be a very good time to ask!
For more industry news and analysis, please visit Enterprising IT’s Industry News page: https://enterprisingit.co.uk/industry-news
