Whiteboard Friday is back for another season of SEO tips, tricks, and insights!
First up, Dr. Pete takes you through some of the new data we've collected on the ways in which Google rewrites title tags. In addition, he shares three titling patterns to avoid if you don’t want them rewritten. Enjoy!
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Video Transcription
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Dr. Pete, the marketing scientist for Moz, and I want to talk to you today about title rewrites[1]. The new version, Google made a bunch of changes in the last 6 or 7 months, and the shortest answer is we don't like them. But as with many things with Google, us not liking them doesn't really change much.
So I want to talk today a bit about what we've seen in the last six months, some new data that we collected[2], if things are different or the same, and some of the scenarios where maybe they don't seem that egregious, but Google is rewriting, and that we might want to avoid and that we might not expect to be a problem. I'm going to go through three of those scenarios.
New title rewrite data
So first of all, we did a re-up on our data from last August. Last August, we found that about 58% of the titles we measured across a set of 10,000 keywords were being rewritten. I'm going to define that in a minute. This time around, we found that number is down to 57%. Hooray, a whole percent! Recently, Cyrus Shepard, who used to be with us at Moz, found a very similar number. Google quotes a very different number. So I