Plus Tips to Beat the Algorithm

Title tags are what we call an outsized Google ranking factor .

Like most Google ranking signals, titles play only a small part in the overall algorithm. But because they are typically the first things users see in Google results, titles can have a large impact on click-through rates and the number of visits your site ultimately receives.

Traditionally, Google used title tags to generate the page title in its search results. Over the years, it wasn’t uncommon to see Google make small changes to the title—typically because of length or relevancy—but these changes were mostly minor.

More recently, Google became much more aggressive with title rewriting, incorporating additional HTML tags and generally rewriting far more titles than previously.

Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten.

Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior.

Google Rewriting Many of Your Page Titles

For this research, we examined a total of 80,959 title tags across 2370 sites from across the globe and compared them against desktop Google results.

In our analysis, we found that Google rewrote 61.6% of the titles.

This number generally agrees with an earlier study conducted by Dr. Pete Meyers using a slightly different methodology. To be fair, many of these Google rewrites are minor (while many aren’t) but 61% is still a very large number.

If Google rewrites a significant number of your titles, it can be helpful to understand why they do this, because Google’s algorithm obviously believes it can write better titles than you.

Looking at individual results, we found a number of common scenarios in which it became more likely for Google to rewrite titles. These scenarios includ:

• Length: overly long titles and short titles
• Using the same keyword more than once
• Use of title separators, such as dashes “-” or pipes “|”
• Titles with [brackets] or (parentheses)
• Identical “boilerplate” used across many titles
• Missing or superfluous brand names

… and more.

Let’s dive into 3 of the most common scenarios that trigger Google rewrites that haven’t yet been explored i