This test came about from some discussions in the Skype group concerning meta descriptions and meta titles. We know that we can add text to the meta description tag beyond Google’s character limit and Google will display it. We also know that this doesn’t work for meta titles. Google will count keywords beyond the title character limit, but will not display them. What if we have two different meta title tags on a page? Will Google display the second meta title if it is relevant to the search or will the second meta title be ignored?
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
In this meta-title, tags is what we are talking about. This comes from a Skype discussion on some of the tests that we have run the last few times. We have found some cool CRO hacks or something that we could do with meta-titles. With meta-titles, we found that Google will index keywords that are beyond what is displayed. If you have a meta title that is too long, Google will do that “…” but they will still consider what is beyond and you can index a page with stuff beyond that. What we found is that Google won’t display anything beyond the “…” like with the normal character length is. So even if you have written something that is relevant – so you have written two meta-descriptions and kind of squished them together, Google will not display the relevant part of the meta-title, it would just do the “…”. So then we started talking in the Skype group about what if you have two meta-title tags? Normally and pretty much in every situation, a page only has one meta title tag. What happens if you put two? I actually did a quick search on this and I could not find anybody that looked at this. The consensus in the Skype group was that it would just be ignored. The second meta title tag would be ignored. But it seemed to be worth a go because if we can get this, then we can write as many meta titles as we like and get the one displayed for the service that we want.
Two separate meta-titles were put on the page, so two separate tags – tag one and tag number two. And then, we tried to index the pages with that. They keywords only exists in the meta-titles themselves. These keywords were not on the page. What we found is that Google indexed the first one but would not index the second one. So in that sense, at least for indexing purposes, Google is ignoring the second tag.
So then we gave it another go where we put the keywords on the page and then tried it with the second meta title and in this situation, while the page would index for the keyword – you can see the keyword that we are searching and there it is with text that is being pulled from the page – this is the first tag, not the second tag. So Google is completely ignoring the second meta-title tag in this situation.
It is not a cool CRO hack. You could not really get any extra benefit for having a second meta title. It would have been fun because obviously, you know that the meta-title is the most important place where you could put a keyword and it seems that Google has really locked down on manipulating extra meta-title tags. They would not index and they would not display.