What's next? Deciding that AdSense provides a better "user experience" than competing ad networks? ("Don't be evil" seems like an increasingly distant memory.)
There is a major conceptual and legal difference between selectively displaying content we created ("snippets"), and Google actually altering the content we created ("title").
To top it all, there seems to be no recourse or opt-out. I have run usability session on our site, you have not.
The titles changed by Google did not fall in any of the categories you mention - which could arguably make it ok to modify the page title.
In my opinion, spamming the title tag is probably the last thing you should do if you want to stay indexed.
It's pretty well known that the title is one of the very most important parts of a page in regards to SEO.
I'm going to assume there is a character or word count that can be triggered that flags for spam / black hat.
Would love to hear from Matt on this one.
I respect and appreciate your explanations, Matt, after I'd checked the keywords ranking fluctuation by using RankTracker. Many times googlebot and robot.texts selected from snippet as their crawled keywords. I compare it at three (3) points of checking location; RankTracker, Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.
I think what Matt is saying,
That if you care about your website, your site must be optimized inside and out. Leaving no title tag or cloning your descriptions, is not going to make you friends at Google.
Frankly I would not want Google to randomly choose me a title tag! No offence a machine is still a machine. Bottom line fix your pages
My question becomes say your article has an important subsection that people are returning to. Does that mean Google will rename my article to that section?
Hi
That's an interesting video. Just thinking about the title aspect for a moment. Does what you say mean if I want to be really lazy, I can just leave the titles blank and let Google fill it in for me?
This presumably means all I need to do is optimise the content for the concept I'm trying to communicate and let google deal with the title and snippets.
So the question - will losing SEO value on few keywords in title tag be offset by the gains in google producing title 'on the fly'
Matt,
If I understood you correctly, you're telling me I can use 100 keywords in my title and they will be counted in the page's scoring. Plus, as an added bonus, Google will alter the page's SERP snippet to make my title more user-friendly and potentially increase click-through.
Hopefully I misunderstood, because that seems like a pretty exploitable feature.
What a great explanation about snippets and Titles. Some webmasters don't understand how important a title of the page is and they keep "spamming" by over using the title tag to include all of their keywords.
Now you know how Google treats this kind of black hat SEO or indirect mistakes.
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