In Google’s explainer about the August 16th update though

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It’s possible that Google is taking a dim view of superlatives like “Best,” but that’s only a theory at this point. Note that there were over 3,000 <title> tags in our data set where “Best” did not get removed, but some of those were contextually important, like “Best Man Speech” or “Best Buy” (the electronics retailer). Speaking of superlatives, here’s an amusing one: I think we can probably all agree that “Must Do Super Fun Things to Do” is pushing the envelope.


Again, we can’t really prove what specifically is triggering this rewrite, but the russia gambling data pattern here is interesting. We saw some similar patterns around marketing terms like “cheap,” “official,” and “2021.” Here’s the kicker, though: in some cases, Google is taking <title> tags without superlatives and adding them back in. For example: Here, Google took a perfectly nice <title> tag, and chose the <H1> that included both “Best” and “Bespoke” instead. This begs the question — are <title> tags with words like “Best” being rewritten because of specific content, or are they being rewritten because of other factors, like length or keyword-stuffing, that just happen to be correlated with that content? Scenario #9: Query-based rewrites We’ve long suspected that Google would rewrite some display titles in real-time based on their relevance (or irrelevance) to the search query.


they stated the following: Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system. So, are we seeing any evidence of query-based rewrites after the August 16th update? One way to test this is to look for pages/URLs that rank for multiple keywords and show different display titles (even though, being one URL, they share a <title> tag).


For example: The first result appeared on a search for “department of corrections,” and the second result on a search for “prison inmate search.” While this seems interesting at first glance, these results were collected across two different locations (and probably two different data centers). When I attempted to reproduce this difference from a single location, I only got back a single (rewritten) display title. In our data set, only 96 URLs showed multiple display titles and only one of those showed more than two variants.