Title Tag

Why It Matters

The title is the largest piece of text in a search result and often the only thing a person reads before deciding whether to click. A page about VAT invoicing titled 'Home' gives the reader nothing, and Google will frequently replace such a title with text pulled from the page instead — analyses of large result sets put the rewrite rate at around a third of pages. Duplicate titles across a set of pages make the results look like one page repeated, which suppresses clicks on all of them. Fixing it costs one line of HTML. Leaving it wrong quietly costs a share of every impression the page will ever earn.

How It Works

A crawler parses the head of the document and reads the text node inside the title element. Google stores that string as a candidate headline, then decides at query time whether to show it or generate a replacement from the H1, from the anchor text of links pointing at the page, or from other on-page text. Distinctive words belong at the front, because truncation always happens at the end. Social platforms ignore the title entirely when Open Graph tags are present, so a page carrying og:title needs both kept in step. If a URL is blocked from crawling, there is no title to read at all, and the listing falls back to whatever other sites call the page.

Real-World Example

Common Mistakes

• ✕Shipping the same title on every page of a site — the results then show a column of identical headlines and one page tends to absorb the clicks meant for the others
• ✕Repeating the target phrase two or three times in the title — it reads as spam to people, and Google rewrites it anyway
• ✕Leading every title with the brand name — the words that distinguish the page get truncated away past about 60 characters
• ✕Assuming the H1 and the title are the same field — they are separate, and a page can easily have a clear H1 and an empty title

Related Terms