Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the
first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers
click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to
write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the
snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.
We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily
the
tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some
pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries,
and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it
easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown
that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query
and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result,
helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this
is the reason we show an alternative title.</p>
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Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no
title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML.
For example, a title using simply the word "Home" is not really
indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is
when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages,
sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor
variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or
hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.</p>
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For more information about how you can write better titles and meta
descriptions, and to learn more about the signals we use to generate
alternative titles, we've recently updated the <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624">Help Center article on this topic</a>.
Also, we try to notify webmasters when we discover titles that can be
improved on their websites through the HTML Suggestions feature in
Webmaster Tools; you can find this feature in the Diagnostics section of
the menu on the left hand side.</p>
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As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en">Webmaster Help Forum</a>.</p>
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<span class="byline-author"><br></span></p>
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<span class="byline-author">Posted by <a href="https://plus.google.com/115984868678744352358/about" rel="author">Pierre Far</a>, Webmaster Trends Analyst</span></p>
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