Why is google rewriting my title tag?

It’s something that a lot of people are having to deal with at the moment, so you’re definitely not alone in this situation where you’ve spent hours crafting the perfect title tag or meta description only for google to completely disregard and display something different.

So what can you do about it, if anything?

Recent studies carried out by the team over at Zyppy have shown that out of 81,000 sites studied, google rewrites the title tags for those pages 61% of the time!

That’s a huge amount of work that’s being disregarded.

Is there a reason for it?

When you’re setting your title tag and meta description, you’re telling Google that this is what you would like it to be, but Google is making up their own mind depending on how they match the intent of the searcher.

You’re almost suggesting to google what you’d like it to be.

It could also be for a number of reasons, such as the title tag being too long, title tag doesn’t match your H1 or it’s stuffed with too many random keywords.

But it’s not always a bad thing.

If you’re finding that google is rewriting your title tag most of the time, then perhaps you should try optimising it to something closer to what they’re changing it to. Google does know best I guess.

Who knows, you may even see some ranking gains from it.

It’s important to not always rest on what you’ve currently got it set to and if you’re noticing a decrease in organic visits to the post, then it could be worth testing some changes. Just be sure to leave it long enough for it to actually have an impact before changing it again.