In every case I spot-checked from a single

[rabhasan018542]

In Google’s explainer about the August 16th update, though, they stated the following: Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system. So, are we seeing any evidence of query-based rewrites after the August 16th update? One way to test this is to look for pages/URLs that rank for multiple keywords and show different display titles (even though, being one URL, they share a <title> tag).


For example: The first result appeared on a search for “department of corrections,” bhutan business email list and the second result on a search for “prison inmate search.” While this seems interesting at first glance, these results were collected across two different locations (and probably two different data centers). When I attempted to reproduce this difference from a single location, I only got back a single (rewritten) display title. In our data set, only 96 URLs showed multiple display titles and only one of those showed more than two variants.


location, those variants disappeared. It appears that Google really has removed or dramatically reduced query-based rewriting. How do you prevent rewrites? There’s currently no way to tell Google not to rewrite your <title> tag (although this latest update has the industry buzzing for that ability), but we can use the scenarios above to develop a few guidelines. (*) Take a deep breath Changing your <title> tags at scale is a time-consuming job and carries risk.