Google has already worked twice on the title tags in 2021 - which led to some incomprehension among SEOs and webmasters, especially after the first update. In the fall of 2021, Google reacted to the feedback and added to it - and has now done further fine-tuning. This is in line with the philosophy of Google's SEO department to continuously respond to feedback.
The title tag is an important element from the user's and search engine bot's point of view: In just a few words, es summarizes what the searcher can expect on the website - and not least in which language the content will be presented. Another reason why this meta data is so important is the indexing behavior of search engines. Because on the basis of this data, Google, for example, creates an image of the website content and archives it on its own servers - similar to the catalog search in a library.
Sometimes, however, es leads to discrepancies between the title and the actual page content - for example, if the page content is written in French, but the title contains both a French and English-language word group (with identical meanings). This is not ideal for the user, who may click on the result expecting to be able to read the content in English - but not understand the French content that is actually there, and leave the page again in frustration.
The new adaptation of the algorithm takes this into account and therefore makes adjustments so that there is a clear overlap between the title and the content of the page. In the case of multilingual title tags, the algorithm would therefore remove the English part if the respective web page is actually completely in French. Strictly speaking, the algorithm thus becomes a bit more intelligent, as it recognizes these inconsistencies and fixes them automatically.
Transliteration occurs when different languages use different characters. Obviously, the Latin script, as in German and English, differs from the characters of, for example, the Hindi and Chinese languages. If the title does not use the correct script, Google's algorithm can henceforth adjust that as well. To do this, it analyzes which characters are primarily used on the respective page and then inserts them into the title according to their meaning.
To prevent such automatic adjustments, which are not always necessarily the best solution from the page operator's point of view, Google recommends a relatively simple approach: From the very beginning, the title should be written in the characters and language in which the content on the actual website is found. If there are no discrepancies in this respect, there is no need for the algorithm to adjust anything on its own at es .
By the way, the update was installed at the beginning of June - so webmasters can react to it already now.
Autor: fbaer