and snippets in Search Results
Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user's query.
We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. We may also use publicly available information, or create rich results based on markup on the page.
While we can't manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the title and snippet displayed for your pages by following the general guidelines below.
Create descriptive page titles
Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It's often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.
Here are a few tips for managing your titles:
- As explained above, make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the
</code> tag.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Page titles should be descriptive and concise. Avoid vague descriptors like <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">"Home"</code> for your home page, or <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">"Profile"</code> for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Avoid keyword stuffing. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. A title like <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">"Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars"</code> doesn't help the user, and this kind of <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">keyword stuffing</a> can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another. Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">"<band name> - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts"</code> contains a lot of uninformative text. One solution is to dynamically update the title to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words "video", "lyrics", etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">"<band name>"</code> as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site's content.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Brand your titles, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">"ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle."</code> But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this:<pre style="font-family: monospace, monospace; direction: ltr; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.
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