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by indigochill 1611 days ago
From a pure HTTP perspective, isn't the point of page titles to be how a page is referenced? It would be an error if a library reported the title of "A Tale of Two Cities" as "It Was The Best of Times".

> stop using long, verbose titles

This is good advice, but if Google wants to penalize bad titles it should dock their rank, not misreport them.
5 comments
tiborsaas 1611 days ago
> isn't the point of page titles to be how a page is referenced

It is, but what would you do if all titles across pages just said "ACME Corp."? That happens often if the developer just displays SITE_NAME in the title.

In those cases it makes sense to present the person searching the web with additional information from a H1 tag which probably has more information like "Contact us"

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renewiltord 1611 days ago
No thanks, as a Google user, I’m happy that Google is descriptive.

Ideally, Google tells me what the page actually contains. I.e. if you title the page “Top TVs of 2022” and you’re reviewing cars, then it titles it appropriately. Google can’t do that right now, but every step closer is a good thing for me.

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shadowgovt 1611 days ago
There's lots of "isn't the point of..." in HTML that actual users have broken. Google (and other crawlers and intermediaries) have to adapt their algorithms to account for that.
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indigochill 1611 days ago
> Google (and other crawlers and intermediaries) have to adapt their algorithms to account for that.

As I see it, Google's in a prime position to algorithmically reward actual users for better HTML discipline by ranking them above users who can't be bothered.

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colejohnson66 1611 days ago
The Search Console is great at knowing if your site could use some improvements. They could easily[a] add a mark for “bad titles”.

[a]: “easily” because they already have logic to determine something needs rewriting

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ldjb 1611 days ago
HTTP actually has nothing to do with page titles. I think web browsers should probably display the titles verbatim, but there may be use cases where they don't, a common one being where there isn't enough space so the title is truncated in the UI.

As for what search engines should do with page titles, it's really up to the individual search engine, I'd say. Whatever serves their users best.

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