A change, hinted by many SEO experts over the past month, was finally confirmed! Danny Sullivan confirmed the search engine is updating the way it , Google, generates web page titles in search results. Basically, Google can now replace web page titles with other on-page text. In other words H1 tags may no longer be showing as the page title and other text from the document may be considered as a replacement. What’s more, Google may also consider using text within links pointing at pages. So yes, Google change to generating web page titles is now officially confirmed!
Does it make any sense? Well, it does. Google may consider using other text in cases when your page’s HTML title tag doesn’t adequately reflect the content, it is too long, stuffed with keywords or contains no text or boilerplate text. So the bottom line is that Google is doing it to provide users with better and more adequate descriptions of the document they are about to access. Obviously, such replacement won’t happen every time so you still have to optimize your HTML title tags. According to Google the original HTML title tags will still be used over 80% of the time. So although you cannot control it, you cannot even opt-out from this update, you still have to take into account when optimizing your page! Hopefully, the replaced text will make sense to the reader!
Anyway, the early feedback is not encouraging and marketers around the world already started reporting decline in CTR.
Good luck to you all…