Google search attorney John Mueller explains whether updating your page titles every day will have a positive or negative impact on your website’s SEO.
This topic was discussed during a Google Search Central SEO Office Hours Hangout that was recorded on February 4th.
An SEO professional named Askash Singh joins the livestream to ask Mueller a series of questions, one of which relates to the impact of changing page titles.
Singh says he has a website that reports stock prices, which requires him to change page titles every day to reflect the latest stock value.
He asks if there is anything wrong with doing this from an SEO standpoint.
Here is Mueller’s response.
Changing Page Titles Daily: Good or Bad for SEO?
Mueller advises not to change page titles every day.
There is no SEO benefit in updating page titles on a regular basis, so it is up to you whether you think there is value to searchers.
However, just because you change your page titles every day, it doesn’t mean that Google will update them in search results every day.
It is possible that Google only updates them every week or every month.
I think that’s fine. I mean, it’s something we wouldn’t give any special weight to if your title tag kept changing. But if you want to update your titles regularly, that’s entirely up to you.
I think the difficulty is that if you change your addresses on a daily basis, we may not be re-crawling that page on a daily basis. So maybe you change it every day, but in the search results the title we’re showing is only a few days old because that’s the last version we picked from that page. But this is more, I say, like a practical effect, rather than a strategic one.”
If your page titles contain time-sensitive information, such as stock prices, they can quickly become outdated if Google only crawls your site once a week.
Singh follows this up by asking if Google would crawl a site more often if Googlebot detected that page titles were constantly changing.
Mueller says you can’t count on that happening.
“I mean, it helps us know when something changes, but it won’t necessarily happen that we’re going to say ‘Oh, we’ve seen this page change every day.'” Therefore, we will re-crawl it every day.
Maybe we crawl it every day, maybe we crawl it every week or every month. This does not mean that changes you make to headers will affect recrawl speed. “
You can use the Google Search Console index report to see how often Googlebot crawls your pages.
From there you can decide if it makes sense to update the page titles each day.
Another important factor to consider is that Google rewrites 61% of page titles.
So even if you update your addresses every day, and Google re-crawls your pages every day, there is no guarantee that Google will return the page address you provided.
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, February 2022.
