Google may change title tags. Does that affect ranking?
- SEO |
Dear SEO practitioners and enthusiasts,
There's several threads on WF and dozens of articles about Google changing page titles in SERPs. They're taking part of the URL or h1 and using that instead of the original title. I know this happens and I understand their reasoning. They might be doing a favour to some webmasters in my opinion.
However, I've got a case in my hands where the positions have dropped after this kind of title change. It's possible that it's redesign (1+ month ago), or some other change, or Panda, or Santa Claus, but title tag change was one of the recent (more than a week, less than a month) operations on the site.
So Google apparently considers these new titles somewhat "spammy" or at least too long. What do you think, can site drop in SERPs because of this? Can it hurt rankings?
Thanks!
There's several threads on WF and dozens of articles about Google changing page titles in SERPs. They're taking part of the URL or h1 and using that instead of the original title. I know this happens and I understand their reasoning. They might be doing a favour to some webmasters in my opinion.
However, I've got a case in my hands where the positions have dropped after this kind of title change. It's possible that it's redesign (1+ month ago), or some other change, or Panda, or Santa Claus, but title tag change was one of the recent (more than a week, less than a month) operations on the site.
So Google apparently considers these new titles somewhat "spammy" or at least too long. What do you think, can site drop in SERPs because of this? Can it hurt rankings?
Thanks!