We've seen the pixel counts in SEO plugins as well as the messages in SEO audit tools telling you your titles are too long and need to fixed. The inference is that it means your titles are not properly optimized. However, there is the display implication that if a title is cut off, its somehow of less value. In this test, we wanted to see if that’s true or not.
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Transcription below:
Alright, so unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Google has changed some stuff in regards to the title tag.
Just recently, they acknowledged that they have a system that is changing them. It was a few months ago that we noticed this actually, I brought it up specifically in the SIA chat group and on my Facebook, identifying how they were changing using H1s instead of the title tags in a lot of the instances.
Well, now they've gone one step further in using machine learning to change title tags. And that machine learning is either using some of the H tags or it's finding some random content or we've even seen it. I saw an instance today there was an SEO show where they were using the URL as the title tag.
I think it's a good example of Google publishing or pushing something live before actually making sure that it's going to work. And I fully expect that they'll turn that off and fix some things. If their data set that they're using to generate these title tags automatically, doesn't get better.
In my experience, they've actually gotten better at some things. So I mean, they could get better and pull some better title tags, which means us as SEOs have to pay more attention to our H1s, H2s, H3s and H4s, make sure that they're relevant to what we're doing so that if Google decides to use, let's say, your H3 tag, for example, because it's more relevant to the query than your original meta title is, then it's at least it's a good one. And it'll be helpful.
So with that, when you do actually look at some of the things that are being fired off, and check the results of these tests and see what's going on. And this one is a test of character counts, we want to see if Google is using now or back then the character count. And bear with me, because we're going to do is actually search for some of these testings and see them live as we go.
Okay, so here, Hunter set it up as 5 pages had a character count of 64, and 5 pages had a character count of 84. And I want to see how that would shake up in the mix. There is our key word, because I'm using this. I want to use something that I can copy out of to make this a little bit easier. But it is an image anyway. So I got this, it's gonna work, "ahaxwezxl"
There they are. So they notice still mixed, right? So they were mixed in the beginning of the test, they are mixed throughout the test 64 was on top, and they are mixed at the end of the test. So at the end of the day, the character count really doesn't matter. So that's what we know. And that still applies here.
As a matter of fact, these 64 fxx is down one, and this is kua xy aa4 is number one, so they flipped. So at the end of the day, we know that character count doesn't really matter. And we also know that the changing of the title tags automatically by this new system didn't affect too much either. It did add this WordPress extension in there. And I believe that the way these test sites the home pages a little has this, this is a WordPress site crap on there. So that's probably why that's kicked in.
But you see, added that into the titles, is also using some of the text you see here getting his spirit, these are random English, English ipsum. If it were pages, and you see it's using the text, not necessarily title tags. So you could argue that because this had a 84, that it went in and found the text and changed it. But this one had 64, which was in the guidelines, air quotes. And it didn't change it too.
So at the end of the day, it didn't really matter. And I'm guessing that it doesn't have enough information as to what this word is really about. So that's why the the test is well still valid, just kind of shows us that this new system is still learning and trying to figure out how and where to find information to make the correct title tag.
So that's pretty interesting. You guys still with me? Hopefully you're still with me. Check it. Okay. So we got that. So the character count doesn't matter even before because this was over before the that thing was air quotes officially launched. And it's still in effect. Now character count doesn't matter. As matter of fact, I think it just kind of illustrates that that's changing.