Title

The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user’s query. We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. We may also use publicly available information, or create rich results based on markup on the page.

Example:

What is Title link in search results?

A title link is the title of a search result on Google Search and other properties.

Google uses a number of different sources to automatically determine the title link, but you can indicate your preferences by following our guidelines for writing descriptive <title> elements.

The <title> element on your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site. For example:

<title>ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle</title>

You can help improve the quality of the title and snippet displayed for your pages by following the general guidelines below.

Here are a few tips for managing your titles:

• Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> tag.

• Page titles should be descriptive and concise. 

Avoid vague descriptors like “Home” for your home page, or “Profile” for a specific person’s profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.

• Avoid keyword stuffing.

It’s sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. 

• Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles.

It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site “Cheap products for sale”, for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another. Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information (“boilerplate” titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like “<band name> – See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts” contains a lot of uninformative text. 

One solution is to dynamically update the title to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words “video”, “lyrics”, etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use “<band name>” as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site’s content.

• Brand your titles, but concisely.

The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site. For instance, “ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle”. But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. 

In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this:<title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>

• Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. 

Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. 

For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else’s site. To display it in search results, Google will need to display a title of some kind and because we won’t have access to any of your page content, we will rely on off-page content such as anchor text from other sites. (To truly block a URL from being indexed, you can use the “noindex” directive.)

How title links in Google Search are created?

Google Search uses the following sources to automatically determine title links:

• Content in <title> elements
• Main visual title or headline shown on a page
• Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
• Other content that’s large and prominent through the use of style treatments
• Other text contained in the page
• Anchor text on the page
• Text within links that point to the page

Keep in mind that Google has to recrawl and reprocess the page to notice updates to these sources, which may take a few days to a few weeks. If you’ve made changes, you can request that Google recrawl your pages.

Common issues with <title> elements

Here are the most common issues we see for <title> elements on web pages.

Common issues
Half-empty <title> elements	When part of the title text is missing. For example: <title>| Site Name</title> Google Search looks at information in header elements or other large and prominent text on the page to produce a title link: Product Name | Site Name
Obsolete <title> elements	When the same page is used year-after-year for recurring information, but the <title> element didn’t get updated to reflect the latest date. For example: <title>2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome</title> In this example, the page has a large, visible headline that says “2021 admissions criteria”, and the <title> element wasn’t updated to the current date. Google Search may detect this inconsistency and uses the right date from the headline in the title link: 2021 admissions criteria – University of Awesome
Inaccurate <title> elements	When the <title> elements don’t accurately reflect what the page is about. For example, the page could have dynamic content with the following <title> element: <title>Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name</title> Google Search tries to determine if the <title> element isn’t accurately showing what a page is about. Google Search might modify the title link to better help users if it determines that the page title doesn’t reflect the page content. For example: Stuffed animals – Site Name
Micro-boilerplate text in <title> elements	When there are repeated boilerplate text in <title> elements for a subset of pages within a site. For example, a television website has multiple pages that share the same <title> element that omits the season numbers, and it’s not clear which page is for what season. That produces duplicate <title> elements like this: <title>My so-called amazing TV show</title> <title>My so-called amazing TV show</title> <title>My so-called amazing TV show</title> Google Search can detect the season number used in large, prominent headline text and insert the season number in the title link: Season 1 – My so-called amazing TV show Season 2 – My so-called amazing TV show Season 3 – My so-called amazing TV show