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by avivo 1611 days ago
I had this problem recently, was hoping there was a reasonable fix but it appears not... (the H1 already contains the title)

I don't think about SEO, and just focus on useful writing / societal impact. However, I recently discovered by accident that I ended up with a top 2 search result for "platform democracy": https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy .

But the title is missing the first 3 words—including the key words "Platform Democracy" — so that if I was a random person aiming to learn about the concept, I would likely skip over the result! (I almost did even though I wrote the piece!) This seems not ideal for either users or Google, and also an interesting exploration of AI/NLP impacts, so I tried to dig a bit deeper.

I had a brief exchange with Danny Sullivan, Google's public @searchliaison on it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413) which linked to two guides from Google on this. Sadly neither were particularly helpful, but will share them here in case they are helpful to others:

- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...

- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-...

(Also plausibly relevant: I have http://platformdemocracy.com/ redirect to the piece. I imagine this might impact search ranking, but I would be surprised if it impacts the title rewriting.)

2 comments

Author here. Frustrating situation. As the title is long at 84 characters, we know that Google is definitely going to rewrite it. The simplest way is to break it into parts and get rid of the shortest part that still makes sense.

So maybe take

'Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure'

And 1) condense it and 2) lose the colon

'Platform Democracy is Policymaking Beyond CEOs & Partisanship' (60 characters)

If that is too condensed, you could try a a short title in the <title> and a longer title in the copy.

Your Google result is actually "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure"