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A google search for
returns results like
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After a little investigation it seems that Google is actually showing slightly different page titles in search results (SERPs) from the exact content of the There are a few different situations. The health page comes up towards the top for me, and it has this title in SERPs:
The actual title on the page is:
So it seems Google is shortening the title to fit into its 65 or so characters. But instead of simply truncating it, it cuts out the middle so it can show "CNN" which was relevant to the search query. Similarly for the cricket article, searching for "Kenyans one dance away from semifinals" shows this in SERPs:
However, if you add "cricket" to the search term, it shows the actual page title (truncated):
The weather page shows this title in SERPs:
It uses a complex chain of redirects, including a meta refresh, 302 and 301 redirect to get to None of the stages along the way have the title from SERPs, and the final page has "Atlanta, GA" in the title. This is meant to be localized content (although I'm not in America). So in this case, either the page returns the above "Weather Forecasts..." title for search engine spiders, or Google is seeing that TL;DR: If a page title is longer than 65 characters, Google may show a different part of the title, depending on the search query. Or if there is no title, it will decide on an appropriate title from links or other sources. As is always the case, this is algorithmic on Google's part and you would not be able to specify this yourself. |
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You can influence the title of a website in the search results by using the html |
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Your original question is not very clear. For example, do you literally want to edit Google’s search result listings? (In that case, I’m fairly certain the answer is no!) On the other hand, are you trying to remove a similar feature as CNN uses in its page titles from your website? As already mentioned on this page, search engines get the titles of listings directly from the value of the TITLE element of the web page’s (X)HTML markup. For example, if you viewed the source code of the first CNN page you mentioned in your question, you would expect to find the following in the HEAD of the HTML document:
However, it is unlikely that a website as large as CNN manages every web page manually. Although I am unsure of the exact set-up over on the CNN website, I imagine they use a server-side scripting language to append the website name to the end of every page they publish. If you want more specific information on how to add or remove this feature from your website, you would have to tell us what kind of system you have going on over on your server in regards to managing your content. For example: Do you have a static website? Do you use ASP.NET or PHP? Do you use a CMS (WordPress/Joomla!/Drupal etc.)? (I hope this helps to point you in the right direction for now!) |
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