The Official Google Blog is an excellent place to get trustworthy information about the goings on of this powerhouse search engine. It’s one of the spots I regularly look to see what changes have occurred and how they affect search engine copywriting.
Recently, Google has been in search quality mode, releasing information about how they create relevant, quality listings for their users by ranking documents (i.e., web pages). Last week, they posted information that sort of rambled on about spell check, languages, etc., etc. Not extremely interesting until you get to the last two paragraphs.
Google discusses the issue of pages that have no HTML title tag and how users normally don’t click those pages. So now, the big G is going to extract page titles from text. Ben Gomes announced, “One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don’t specify an HTML title — yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To “see” that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant.” My translation… they look for <H> tags and/or bold/ capitalization combos to determine a title tag. These snippet titles pulled from the page must contain the keywords a user searched for.
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Let me restate so as not to cause a web-wide panic: Google is now pulling snippet page titles ONLY for those pages that do not include a title in their HTML code. From what I’ve read, this is not like Google’s practice of sometimes using the designated description tag and sometimes pulling a snippet from the page.
I’m sure no SEO copywriters are neglecting to include title tags, but – just the same – I thought I’d share this new development. 🙂
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