The Google Search Center has updated a section of its developer support page with tips on how to control the website title Google uses in search results. The new section is about troubleshooting title tags to determine why Google might change title links.

title link

The support page defines the title seen in the search results as a title link. Title links are usually derived from what the publisher uses in the title tag.

However, Google can change the title link to something else. Some publishers and others in the SEO community have reported a drop in traffic from search results when Google changes the title tag that appears as a title link.

Title Linking Best Practices

Google provides seven best practices for writing title tags that affect what Google shows in search results.

Seven Title Tag Best Practices

1. Make sure each page has a title tag.

2. Write concise title tags to describe the content of the page. It also means avoiding vague descriptions, like a homepage or profile, Google added.

3. Avoid keyword stuffing.

4. Avoid repetitive boilerplate throughout the site.

5. Brand phrases are okay before they become boilerplate. It’s acceptable to use branded phrases on the home page (eg, “where people meet and communicate”), but Google warns against repeating branded phrases on many other pages.

6. Google sometimes uses the content in the title element in the title link. For this reason, Google recommends using a unique heading, usually contained within an H1 or H2 heading element at the top of the page.

According to Google:

“Google looks at a variety of sources when creating headline links, including primary visual headlines, headline elements, and other large, prominent text, which can be confusing if multiple headlines have the same visual weight and prominence.

Consider making sure your main title is distinct from the rest of the text on the page, and is highlighted on the page (e.g. use a larger font, place the title first visible on the page

element, etc.). “

7. Use Robots.txt correctly. Google warns that Robots.txt should only be used to block crawling of web pages. The misuse of Robots.txt is to prevent pages from being indexed, because pages blocked by robots.txt can still be indexed if other pages or websites link to the blocked pages.

Google suggests that if a page is blocked by robots.txt and Google cannot crawl the page, then Google may end up using anchor text from sites that link to that page.

Publishers are reminded that the most effective way to exclude a page from the index is to allow Google to crawl it and discover a noindex meta tag, which will prevent Google from including the page in Google’s index.

Google explains how to create header links

Title links are automatically generated based on the information contained in the pages themselves, as well as other sites referencing those pages.

Google lists the following factors that affect the title links Google displays in search results:

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