When Google Takes Meta Data Into Its Own Hands

Are you serious? Google rewrites your page titles!!? Does that mean I have no control over what shows up on Google’s SERP?

Yes, it’s very true… but let’s look at how you can get them to rewrite it according to YOUR rules (business name and location changed for privacy purposes)

Over the weekend – an Attorney PPC client of mine let me know that his home page was showing up weird on Google… (although we don’t do SEO for them – I’m glad to help… yes, even on weekends… sometimes 🙂 )

If you searched “Attorney John Smith” on Google (and this is how they are referred to in the media and in general) – the Title Tag for the home page was:

attorney John Smith’s

We can all agree that Meta Title is YUGLY and highly unprofessional… So I dug a bit deeper…. the actual Title Tag was:

Dallas Car Accident Attorney, Personal Injury Lawyer | John T. Smith, PC

As you can see – nowhere in the Title Tag does it clearly say “Attorney John Smith” we can assume that Google took the liberty to rewrite it so that it was “more accurate”… yes when you leave things up to a machine… it doesn’t always work…

We went in and updated the Title Tag to:

Dallas Car Accident & Personal Injury Lawyer | Attorney John Smith

Voila – overnight Google changed it to:

Attorney John Smith: Dallas Car Accident & Personal Injury…

Although the end result is not exactly what I wrote, it’s definitely SO MUCH BETTER!!! My small change gave Google more to work with and fix up its mistake.

When Google takes Meta Titles into its own hands – see what it’s looking for, go in and write a better title that contains the “soul” of what Google is looking for, and you can steer Google in the right direction.

How have you dealt with Google rewriting your Meta Titles? Did you even know that Google is rewriting your Meta Titles?