

Does Google Care About Page Titles? A Response to Gruber's "Title Junk" Piece. - davidkatz
http://www.sciten.com/post/2405190049/does-google-care-about-page-titles

======
ashearer
John Gruber speculates that SEO-style titles don't work for SEO, and goes on
to state that they're useless. This author reads a Google starter guide that
says search engines read titles and that you should come up with good ones,
and states "I think it's safe to say" that SEO-style titles actually do work.

There's little to no science happening here. It's amazing that despite search
engines being such an important part of our lives, we still aren't sure about
this basic question.

In a more ideal version of the world (that is, better for all of us except
black-hat SEOs), Google's relevance and anti-gaming algorithms would be strong
enough to withstand being opened up. But in reality, Google warns [1] that
full knowledge would open the floodgates to search-engine spam, while the
black-hat SEO industry already thrives on the meager number of flaws they
stumble upon themselves.

So barring openness from the inside, the next best thing would be for
scientific experiments to figure out what matters, attacking the problem from
the outside. Though some SEO experts try to do this, many of their articles
just retell folklore, or micro-analyze offhand gospel from Google employees,
or run worthless experiments that end with the author reasserting a hunch. (To
be fair, setting up a valid experiment is difficult. Algorithms change without
notice, different data centers return different results, the rest of the
Internet changes constantly, and there's no control Google. Physics, at least,
runs the same from different locations.)

The best, most rigorous way I can think of to test hypotheses would be a set
of carefully controlled pages with no outside competition (Googlewhacks).
Something like this must have been tried before. If it has, can anyone point
to it?

[1] <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html>

------
avree
Google cares, I'm not sure how much, so I Googled it.

Not sure what this blog post actually says.

------
ameyamk
Summary: Yes, Google does care about the page titles, so tune it.

~~~
davidkatz
I was more going for something like: 'It's clear Google cares to some degree,
but how much and in what way isn't clear'

