Sadly, dozens of pages in this data set still had some variant of

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Google appears to be truncating the <title> tag and appending the brand name to the end of it. The removal of the brand name from the front is probably an accident of truncation. Scenario #7: <Title> is too short Channeling a bit of Goldilocks, sometimes your <title> tag is too long for Google and sometimes it’s too short. Here’s an example from a recipe result: This one’s an odd duck (pun intended) — in addition to appending the brand name, Google has expanded the title, and that exact phrase appears nowhere in any major page elements.


Here’s an example where Google rewrote a brand-only <title> tag: Again, this russia gambling data was pulled from an <H1> tag on the page. What’s unclear is whether Google is rewriting these titles because they’re too short or because they aren’t particularly relevant to the query space. This brings us to Scenario #8: Scenario #8: Relevance issues At this point we don’t really know the exact trigger for a rewrite, but it does seem like some titles are being rewritten because they aren’t a good fit to query intent.


“Home” as their <title> tag: In the majority of these cases, Google is rewriting the display title as the brand name. Of course, “Home” is also potentially just too short. Here’s an example of a longer <title> tag where relevance might have come into play: Putting aside the odd orphaned pipe (|) at the beginning, I’d argue that this <title> tag is generic marketing copy that doesn’t do much to inform searchers.


Scenario #8.5: Marketing lingo That last case led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I’m not sure if this is a sub-case of #8 or a separate phenomenon. There were about 700 cases in our data set where Google rewrote a <title> tag with the word “Best” in it to remove that word. Here’s another example: Once again, Google pulled the <H1> from the target page, but the rewrite and the original <title> tag share very similar intent and format.