Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller explains whether updating page titles every day will have a positive or negative impact to your website’s SEO.
This topic is discussed during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on February 4.
An SEO professional named Askash Singh joins the livestream to ask Mueller a series of questions, one of which has to do with the impact of changing page titles.
Singh says he has a website that reports on stock prices, which requires him to change page titles every day to reflect a stock’s latest value.
He asks if there’s anything wrong with doing that from an SEO standpoint.
Here’s Mueller’s response.
Changing Page Titles Daily: Good Or Bad For SEO?
Mueller doesn’t advise against changing page titles every day.
There’s no SEO benefit to updating page titles on a regular basis, so it’s up to you whether you think there’s value in it for searchers.
However, just because you change your page titles every day it doesn’t mean Google will update them in search results every day.
It’s possible Google will only update them every week or every month.
“I think that’s fine. I mean, it’s something where we wouldn’t give it any special weight if your title tag keeps changing. But if you want to update your titles regularly that’s totally up to you.
The difficulty, I suspect, is more that if you change your titles on a daily basis, we might not re-crawl that page on a daily basis. So it might be that you change it every day, but in the search results the title that we show is a few days old just because that’s the last version that we picked up from that page. But that’s more of, I’d say, like a practical effect, rather than a strategic effect.”
If your page titles contain time-sensitive information, such as stock prices, they may quickly be outdated if Google only crawls your site once a week.
Singh follows up by asking if Google will crawl a site more often if Googlebot discovers the page titles are constantly changing.
Mueller says you can’t count on that happening.
“I mean, it helps us to recognize when something has changed, but it’s not necessarily going to happen that we’re going to say ‘oh, we’ve seen this page change every day. Therefore, we will recrawl it every day.’
It might be that we re-crawl it every day, it might be that we re-crawl it every week or every month. So it’s not that the changes that you make with the titles would affect how quickly we re-crawl.”
You can use Google Search Console’s index report to see how frequently Googlebot crawls your pages.
From there you can decide whether it makes sense to update page titles every day.
Another important factor to keep in mind is Google rewrites 61% of page titles.
So even if you update your titles every day, and Google re-crawls your pages every day, there’s still no guarantee Google will display the page title you’ve provided.
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, February 2022.
