Titlepocalypse! Google Updates How They Generate Web Page Titles

Titlepocalypse!

That's what some people are calling Google's new system of generating titles for web pages in the search results.

According to the Search Central post,

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.

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 or other header tags, and content that's large and prominent through the use of style treatments.

Other text contained in the page might be considered, as might be text within links that point at pages.

The post goes on to explain why more than HTML title tags are used and how focusing on good HTML title tags remains valid.

However, so far, the reviews aren't good. Here's one SEO who reports her clicks declined by over 60k in the past week, even though the average ranking position stayed the same, and ano...