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  • Create good titles
  •  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.
  • Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else's site. To display it in search results, Google will need to display a title of some kind and because we won't have access to any of your page content, we will rely on off-page content such as anchor text from other sites. (To truly block a URL from being indexed, you can use the "noindex" directive.)
  • Why the search result title might differ from the page's tag</h3> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query.</p> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> When we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.</p> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> If you’re seeing your pages appear in the search results with modified titles, check whether your titles have one of the problems described above. If not, consider whether the alternate title is a better fit for the query. If you still think the original title would be better, let us know in our <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/community" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">Webmaster Help Forum</a>.</p> <ul class="spaced-list" style="margin: 0.25rem 0px 0.75rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></ul> <h2 style="color: rgb(32, 33, 36); font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, sans-serif; font-weight: 400; font-size: 1.5rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;"> <a id="how-snippet-created" name="how-snippet-created"></a>How snippets are created</h2> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> Snippets are automatically created from page content. Snippets are designed to emphasize and preview the page content that best relates to a user's specific search: this means that a page might show different snippets for different searches.</p> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> Site owners have two main ways to suggest content for the snippets that we create: rich results and meta description tags.</p> <ul style="margin: 0.25rem 0px 0.75rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <li style="margin: 0.25rem 0px; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;"><a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/search-gallery" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">Rich results</a>: Add structured data to your site to help Google understand the page: for example, a review, recipe, business, or event. <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/search-features" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">Learn more about how rich results can improve your site's listing in Search results.</a></li> <li style="margin: 0.25rem 0px; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Meta description tags: Google sometimes uses <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);"><meta></code> tag content to generate snippets, if we think they give users a more accurate description than can be taken directly from the page content.</li> </ul> <ul class="spaced-list" style="margin: 0.25rem 0px 0.75rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></ul> <h3 style="color: rgb(32, 33, 36); font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, sans-serif; font-weight: 500; font-size: 1.25rem; line-height: 1.75rem; margin: 1.5rem 0px 0.5rem;"> <a id="nosnippet" name="nosnippet"></a>How to adjust snippet presentation</h3> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> You can, alternatively, either prevent snippets from being created and shown for your site in Search results, or let Google know about the maximum lengths that you want your snippets to be. Use the <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812" rel="noopener" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">nosnippet meta tag</a> to prevent Google from displaying a snippet for your page in Search results, or use the <code style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color: rgb(24, 128, 56);">max-snippet:<em>[number]</em></code> meta tag to specify the maximum length for your result snippets. You can also prevent certain parts of the page text content from being shown in a snippet by using <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812#data-nosnippet" rel="noopener" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">data-nosnippet</a>.</p> <h3 style="color: rgb(32, 33, 36); font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, sans-serif; font-weight: 500; font-size: 1.25rem; line-height: 1.75rem; margin: 1.5rem 0px 0.5rem;"> <a id="meta-descriptions" name="meta-descriptions"></a>Create good meta descriptions</h3> <p style="margin-top: 0.25rem; margin-bottom: 0.75rem;"> Google will sometimes use <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812" style="color: rgb(103, 58, 183); text-decoration-line: none;">the <meta> description tag</a> from a page to generate a search results snippet, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convince the user that the page is exactly what they're looking for. There's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.</p> <ul class="spaced-list" style="margin: 0.25rem 0px 0.75rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <li style="margin: 0.25rem 0px; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include information about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.<pre style="font-family: monospace, monospace; direction: ltr; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><meta name="Description" content="Written by A.N. Author, Illustrated by V. Gogh, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"></pre> In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse. Page-specific data is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.</li> <li style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25rem; list-style-type: none; padding-left: 1rem;">Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.</li> </ul> </div> </div>

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