Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another edition of whiteboard friday i'm dr pete the marketing scientist for moz i want to talk to you today about title rewrites uh the new version google made a bunch of changes in the last six seven months and the short answer is we don't like them but as with many things with google us not liking them doesn't really change much so i want to talk today a bit about what we've seen in the last six months some new data that we collected and if things are different or the same and some of the scenarios where maybe they don't seem that egregious but google is rewriting and that we might want to avoid and that we might not expect to be a problem and i'm going to go through three of those scenarios so first of all we did a re-up on our data from last august and last august we found that about 58 percent of the titles we measured across a set of 10 000 keywords were being rewritten i'm going to define that in a minute uh this time around we found that numbers down to 57 hooray a whole percent uh recently cyril shepherd used to be with us at moz found a very similar number google quote's a very different number and so i want to talk to you a little bit about how we're defining things and how we're going to change that up a little bit on the mozz side so our 57 includes a lot of stuff and it includes first of all this blue section of the pie this bluish green i use too many blue greens here which i call truncation and that really is when the title's too long and google has to cut it off this has been around forever in some form and what can you do you know the box right now is 600 ish pixels long you run out of space you're out of space not really google's fault they did change things up a little bit six or seven months ago and now instead of just that cutting off and the dot dot dot at the end they might take a piece from the middle they might take a complete segment from the middle and not even put the dot dot dot but i'm going to call all of that truncation because they are using your title tag and it's just too long so i've pulled that out i've also pulled out what i call addition and in this case that's where google appends either your brand name or sometimes a location and so they're using your title or segment of your title sometimes they truncate and add which is a little confusing and then adding some additional information they think is useful again i don't think it's really fair to call that a rewrite so when we pull those out we're seeing about 30 of the titles in this data set being rewritten on high volume competitive keywords if you read what google says they're calling a rewrite a situation where they take text from somewhere else on the page say an h1 or some body text and they're using that instead of the title tag so they're not counting modifications so we just have to be aware that their definition and ours are a bit different and there is a lot of gray area i don't want to talk today about kind of the obvious rewrites where i think google is doing a good job if every single page on your website is called website and google rewrites that i think that's probably fine that's good for users right and it's probably good for you and for your click-through rate and your engagement if you take your entire laundry list of keywords and csv dump them and put them in your title tag and google rewrites that i'm gonna side with google on that one too uh sorry but that's not great so i think there are situations where google is doing a decent job i think it is going to get better over time but i want to talk about three scenarios that might surprise you a little bit and i want you to be careful of so i'm going to use this fictional business bob's boba i'm a boba tea fan the red for the delimiters is intentional one of the things we're finding is that google is getting a little aggressive about commas and pipes and dashes and using them to break things up or seeing them as ways to just separate keywords uh so we have to be a little cautious i think they're overdoing that right now and may tone it down they've toned it down a little bit but not quite enough so my first scenario is what i'll call keyword stuffing light it's not egregious and it kind of makes sense but google might not see it that way so this example boba tea milk tea woola okay three products 27 varieties of boba cupertino fremont sunnyvale bob's boba all of those things are true in our fictional scenario all of them are useful i'm not really stuffing more than three things of the same type in a row but a couple things one it's too long google's gonna cut that off two they don't really separate these things conceptually very well yet they do a little bit and so they might just still see this as a string of keywords and we are seeing things like this getting rewritten now in the past they might just take you know the first part of this and dot dot dot and cut it off and you'd be okay the challenge now is they could take something in the middle right so you could end up with cupertino fremont sunnyvale as your display title probably not but you don't really have that control and now there are more options from google standpoint which in a way means you have less control you know it's a little more unpredictable what's going to happen so this is a scenario where are you doing anything terribly wrong no but shorten this you know be in control that's going to be a message of all of these take more control over this process because google is going to take more liberties and they're going to do more than just truncate so i would suggest focusing on your critical keywords here and not trying to do so much in the title second example is superlatives you know going heavy on marketing copy and this doesn't seem that bad right the 11 best boba blends for boba lovers okay i put best in all caps it's a little much but this isn't super spammy i'm not loaded with marketing terms but we are seeing google do a fair amount of rewrites on this kind of title and even stuff that's not that over the top and i think the argument is that it's kind of empty you know it doesn't really tell people much and you know i think you could argue that there are better more informative titles that might be good for search users and for your engagement again the challenge here is google isn't going to just truncate this they're going to pick something different on your page to replace it with and what's weird right now is the thing on your page they replace it with might be even more superlative more marketing copy so i'm seeing some weird stuff and okay maybe if they take that h1 or that header it's gonna be okay but again you don't control that so be aware of these things and maybe tone the language down a bit and be a little more descriptive you know there is a happy medium finally we have something that isn't keyword stuffing at all it's long and it's text heavy but this is really just a reflection of the site architecture right going from brand to category to sub category to product we see this all the time so this example bob's bobo drinks menu boba tea popping boba fruit flavored popping boba mango popping boba okay i've overdone it a little bit but this is a perfectly acceptable site architecture if the site was fairly large and it's very common for people and for cmss to try and reflect that in the title the problem here again is google isn't just going to truncate this they might pick something like flavored popping boba dash bob's boba and actually mix and match this in whatever way they want could be okay but again you're not in control of it we used to advise flipping this you know we used to say put the most unique part for the page first so mango popping boba flavored popping boba on and on bob's boba at the end in a simple truncation scenario that was fine but now that google is potentially taking something in the middle i don't think that's going to work so well anymore so i do think you need to tighten this up and control it i know some people are going to argue well this is a perfectly valid reflection of our site architecture yes it is you're not doing anything wrong but is this really good for users you know people on search they have short attention span you scan i scan the way we use search and the way we think is seos aren't always the same so you're not going to read all this even if it was displayed and this is not really all useful for the visitor it's perfectly fine in your site architecture to navigate this way and to have that structure that's great but you don't need all this in your title tag so pick that most unique thing you can put the brand on the end if you want again you control that not google so three scenarios here uh keyword stuffing light going a little too heavy on that marketing copy and finally trying to stuff your entire site navigation into the title none of these terrible things and you're not a bad person but you're very likely to get rewritten and the rewrites might be a little more random than you'd like this data just from this past month about 30 rewrites it hasn't really changed that much since google did the rollout back in august so be careful be aware measure and adjust as you go thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on whiteboard friday take care