Back in August, we analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google released the following statement[1]:
Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.
This immediately raises two questions. First, has the situation improved? Second, why the huge mismatch between our numbers (and similar numbers by others[2] in the community)?
Rewrites by the numbers
We collected new data on March 2, 2022 from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here are the basic stats, which are very similar to what we found in August 2021:
-
84,639 page-one results
-
71,265 unique URLs
-
57,832 <title> tags
-
33,733 rewrites
So, let’s compare the August 2021 rewrites to the March 2022 rewrites:
Technically, the numbers did go down, but this probably isn’t the news you had hoped to hear. If 57% of titles in our study were rewritten, then — I think we can all agree with this math — 43% did not get rewritten. So, how do we reconcile our 43% with Google’s 87%?
Truncation, from simple to …
First off, our definition of “rewrite” is extremely broad, and it covers truncation, where Google just runs out of physical space. In August, I took a pretty simplistic view of truncation, but let’s try to give Google some benefit of the doubt. I’m going to dig into three forms of truncation, starting with the simplest:
1) Simple truncation
The simplest form of truncation is when Google cuts off a long title but preserves the original text from the beginning. For example:
No one