SEO Consultants, please note this post is not just about Google simply changing title tags (that’s old), this is about Google using title attribute of a hyperlink in the SERPs.
Dynamically changing titles is not a new thing, in fact I have seen many instances where Google does a really good job by shortening title tags which does actually help users. However, I came across the following anomaly. Search for “estate agents in leicester” and you will see the following results:
As you can see, Harrison Murray’s title reads “Harrison Murray Estate Agents (Opens in new window”. This is a rather strange dynamic change because “opens in new window” does not really help users, in fact it is rather confusing because all links open in the same window.
What is happening?
The main horizontal menu on Harrison Murray’s site is based on images (see below), each image appears inside a list item and all links have title attributes.
The title you see in SERPs reads “Harrison Murray Estate Agents (Opens in new window” but that exact title doesn’t appear anywhere in the actual code. The hard-coded meta title tag simply reads “Harrison Murray”.
Google is doing two things here:
- Appending “Estate Agents” after the brand name or the hard coded title tag.
- Strangely Google is appending part of the title attribute from the menu item(s) which in this case is “(opens in new window)”
Here are the title attributes for the top horizontal menu:
- title=”Exclusive Homes Service (opens in new window)”
- title=”Buying with HM (opens in new window)”
- title=”Selling with HM (opens in new window)”
- title=”Lettings (opens in new window)”
- title=”Mortgages (opens in a new window)”
- title=”Surveys”
- title=”Conveyancing”
- title=”AboutHM”
- title=”Contact”
As you can see, 5 title attributes contain “(opens in new window)”, notice the 0 in “open” is lowercase in the source code but in the SERP Google changes it to uppercase.
What does this imply? Do title attributes carry more weight than we are led to believe?
Update:
Dan Barker has looked into this a bit further and has found that the majority of alt attributes in letting pages point back to the homepage with “Harrison Murray Estate Agents (Opens in new window” alt attrib. So, perhaps it is the alt tag that is triggering this?
You bring up a great point. What is the cause of the dynamic titles in the local search results?
I have been asking myself for months and it has not made much sense until now. I did my own research and found that many of my examples have the same type of occurrence due to the title attribute.
Nice find!
Hi Daniel,
I know same page anchor texts appear as snippets etc but title attributes is very new, at least to me. I haven’t seen anything like this before. It would be great if we could find some more examples…
Interesting someone brought this up. I have seen this randomly as well. Sometimes I think Google is just trying too much but then again, that’s what makes them Google.
Hi Al Sefati,
Can you share the ones you have come across?
Good find. I think this is a case where the site’s coding and SEO is so bad (no unique page titles, dreamweaver navigation, low content/code ratio etc) that Google is really having to analyse every element on the page to determine relevancy and represent that in it’s search results.
Hi Mike,
Yes, you are absolutely right but I just don’t see why they have relied on title attribute instead of alt tag.
I think you’re reading too much into it – Google appears to just be using alt text of internal links where this entire string is actually used as displayed:
http://bit.ly/qERFPU
Hi Ben,
Dan Barker mentioned the same thing. It is hard to put fingers on this as there is a mixture of title attributes + alt tags mentioning the same thing. However, looking at it now it does look like alt tags could be main trigger.
Yousaf – well spotted. That’s very interesting. It provides evidence that Google does pay attention to a image link title.
It looks like it is possibly pulling the image link title because the information displayed on the page title is duplicated throughout the site and isn’t very useful.
[...] peso dei title attributes nelle SERP di Google… Curiosa segnalazione riguardante Google: in questo post pubblicato su ElevateLocal – e postato su Twitter da Gianluca Fiorelli -, viene fatta notare [...]
Yousaf – yeah you’re probably right, the title tags are possibly adding some extra weight and contributing to the alt text being the used.
Interesting spot either way.
Ben, I might set a few tests and see what happens
I’m more concerned that you might actually be buying a property in Leicester!
lol whats wrong with Leicester?
i already use this tag … so i’ll keep this line in my todolist/check list
thanks for sharing Daniel !
Sebastien
There are also links with this anchor on external sites.
The accuracy is, very teensy-weensy discretion change-over in return most people.
This is a very interesting find. It’s definitely worth playing around a little to see if it helps in any way or can be used to leverage an advantage. Thanks for the post.
It doesn’t say much for Google’s relevancy, but nevertheless quite odd how that is being shown, especially in the places results.
Yet it does not seem to describe the alt image, it is useful
If you have a dynamic title, then this can be very useful for on page seo