Influencing Title Links in Google Search | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers (original) (raw)

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Influencing your title links in search results

A title link is the title of a search result on Google Search and other properties (for example, Google News) that links to the web page. Google uses a number of different sources to automatically determine the title link, but you can indicate your preferences by following our best practices for influencing title links.

An illustration of a text result in Google Search, with a highlighted box around the title link part

How to make crispy fried eggs

Best practices for influencing title links

Title links are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it's relevant to their query. It's often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click, so it's important to use high-quality title text on your web pages.

• Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element.
• Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements. Avoid vague descriptors like "Home" for your home page, or "Profile" for a specific person's profile.
  Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose text in your <title> elements. While there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.
• Avoid keyword stuffing. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the <title> element, but there's no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. Title text like "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars" doesn't help the user, and this kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.
• Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in <title> elements. It's important to have distinct text that describes the content of the page in the <title> element for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish between two pages. Long text in the <title> element that varies by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) is also bad; for example, a common <title> element for all pages with text like "Band Name - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts" contains a lot of uninformative text.
  One solution is to dynamically update the <title> element to better reflect the actual content of the page. For example, include the words "video" and "lyrics" only if that particular page contains video or lyrics.
• Brand your titles concisely. The <title> element on your site's home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site. For example:

  ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle But displaying that text in the `` element of every single page on your site will look repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your [site name](/search/docs/appearance/site-names) at the beginning or end of each `<title>` element, separated from the rest of the text with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this: <title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.

• Make it clear which text is the main title for the page. Google looks at various sources when creating title links, including the main visual title, heading elements, and other large and prominent text, and it can be confusing if multiple headings carry the same visual weight and prominence. Consider ensuring that your main title is distinctive from other text on a page and stands out as being the most prominent on the page (for example, using a larger font, putting the title text in the first visible <h1> element on the page, etc).
• Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else's site. If we don't have access to the content on your page, we will rely on off-page content to generate the title link, such as anchor text from other sites. To prevent a URL from being indexed, you can use the noindex rule.
• Use the same language and writing system (meaning, the script or alphabet for a given language) as the primary content on your pages. For example, if a page is written in Hindi, make sure to also write the <title> element in Hindi (don't write title text in English or transliterate the title into Latin characters).
  Google tries to show a title link that matches the primary language and writing system of a page. If Google determines that a <title> element does not match the writing system or language of the page's primary content, we may choose a different text as the title link.
• Avoid including flight price information in <title> elements. Our systems will likely not show price information when generating title links for flight pages. This is because pricing for flights can change so fast (sometimes every few minutes), that what's shown in title links may not correspond to the actual price on the landing page.

How title links in Google Search are created

Google's generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the title link is to best represent and describe each result.

Google Search uses the following sources to automatically determine title links:

• Content in <title> elements
• Main visual title shown on the page
• Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
• Content in og:title meta tags
• Other content that's large and prominent through the use of style treatments
• Other text contained in the page
• Anchor text on the page
• Text within links that point to the page
• WebSite structured data

Keep in mind that Google has to recrawl and reprocess the page to notice updates to these sources, which may take a few days to a few weeks. If you've made changes, you canrequest that Google recrawl your pages.

While we can't manually change title links for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the title link that's displayed for your page by following the best practices.

Common issues and how Google manages them

Here are the most common issues we see with title links in search results. To avoid these issues, follow thebest practices for influencing title links.