Google’s Danny Sullivan confirms the search engine is updating the way it generates web page titles in search results.
“Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system. This is because we think our new system is producing titles that work better for documents overall, to describe what they are about, regardless of the particular query.”
Google’s new system of generating web page titles has been documented extensively since it was discovered in live search results last week.
As was observed by those within the SEO industry, Google is in fact replacing web page titles with other on-page text:
“Also, while we’ve gone beyond HTML text to create titles for over a decade, our new system is making even more use of such text. In particular, we are making use of text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page. We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within < H1 > tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.”
