As most SEOs will tell you, title tags are up there with what they find important. Sure there are plenty of other things to look at, but titles, well they should be done properly. Titles can be the make or break for you in the SERPs, where better written titles can effect your CTR. So this morning checking on some brands I found that when I used the domain name, which has keywords, it simply showed this up for the title. I was a little shocked, as I know I love my title, which is nicely targeted to the audience it’s focused on. As I can’t share the client project, I had to find another example, and here it is.
Instead of “Aer Lingus- cheap flights, gift vouchers, hotels, car hire, & travel insurance”, it’s now just replaced with “Aer Lingus”. I’m not quite sure what we can take away from this, but I do wonder
- Are title tags loosing importance ?
- Are title tags with none relevant keywords being filtered or peanlised ?
- Are they just filtering title tags that have delimiters like -, : or | tags ?
To me it seems like a strange move by Google, and one that I’m not really sure about.
And it’s not just position 1 rankings, here is a shot for a search of [blacknight] on google.de, logged in.
Here they have chopped off the business name, “Blacknight Solutions“, instead of the full title “European Web hosting based in Ireland, exchange hosting, domain registration, dedicated servers, colocation – Blacknight Solutions“.
So is this bye bye to the advantage of writing good titles ?
4.2.2011
I’ve noticed this with my own site for quiet a while now. (about two months) Google tries to show the most relevant search result for a term used. If someone searches for Blacknight that’s exactly what they get, which is the same with Aer Lingus. I think they are basically trying to clean up the search result for the people who matter ie. the customer.
4.3.2011
Hi Keith, one only issue I would have is that the same page might be presented to users with different titles. So they might not know that they’ve already visited the page, even though they’ve used a different search phrase. Also when these things are done automatically, they are bound to be cases with companies having a colon or dah in their name, and it gets chopped off in the wrong way.
Thanks for popping by !
Paul
P.S. the link images that under “Irish Design News” on you home page are broken.
4.8.2011
Hi Paul, Thanks for the reply. My site was hacked so I have a backup running while I wait for the site to be tidied up:) I’ll backup wordpress the next time!!
4.9.2011
Sorry to hear it was hacked Keith, it’s important to keep your software up to-date to avoid these things, right now you are still running an old version of WordPress, that has known vulnerabilities, so make sure you get someone to upgrade that to avoid such things in the future !
Have a great weekend !