Friday, March 1, 2013

2:28 AM

Colons in Page Titles: Google Appending Brand Ahead Of Search Results Title

It looks like Google are either doing a test or have recently had a change on how they display page titles and are right now utilizing colons as page title separators. Every SEO is aware of that Google handle (-) and (|) as keyword separators, and it now seems that they may want us to begin to use colons.

This below query is for site:gordoncampbell.co.uk ,as you are will see Google is displaying the page title as ‘Gordon Campbell: Glasgow SEO, PPC & Social Media Consultant’ but the page title he has put is ‘Glasgow SEO, PPC & Social Media Consultant – Gordon Campbell’ so it seems that Google is rearranging his page title to present it improve on the search engine results pages.

Gordon Campbell SEO
The following query is on weights York Fitness, Google has brought us with the page title ‘York Fitness: Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing’ but the page title that York Fitness has set is ‘Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing Equipment | York Fitness’ and truth be told, Google’s version of the page title looks far better.

York Fitness Search Brand Snippet

Now if you see at the source code of this website you will see the title is not written this way:

Brand Title Tag of York Fitness

&
Ymedialabs Search Result

Try a search for the keyword weights and you will find that Amazon already generates page titles in this format and have done for some time. Have they done tests on this at some point and found that page headings have a higher CTR in this format? Have they discovered that page titles like this are inclined to rank well? Who is aware of but I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyone else noticed this? Extra instances would be grateful. If you ever discovered this useful you should consider and sharing it on social media platforms.