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Google seems to use the Title tag as the primary source for determining sitelink titles.

However, I noticed that for some sites, the page title is not the same as the sitelink title.

For example, Airbnb has a sitelink titled 'Business Travel':

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But when you enter the page the title is actually 'Corporate & Business Travel on Airbnb':

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Does anyone know how to determine the title of a sitelink, and make it different than the target page's title?

Thanks!

*Note: The precise process of determining the sitelink title is automated, and Google is not transparent about it at the moment.

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  • Sorry but the question has been asked several times in various forms on Pro Webmasters. Google regularly will rewrite titles for searches determined to be most useful for the user, or least that's what Google aim's to do. So having a title with APPLES, may appear as BANANAS in the search results determined by what people are searching for and how relevant the page is to the keyword they are searching. Fact is, titles and headers do not determine what you rank for in Google results, they are signals of hundreds. This includes sitelinks by the way, treated exactly the same but lower chars shown.
    – Simon Hayter
    Jul 16, 2017 at 13:58
  • Other similar questions (1), (2), (3) etc.
    – Simon Hayter
    Jul 16, 2017 at 14:06
  • I'm re-opening this question because the marked duplicate (and other similar questions) do not address sitelinks. They focus only on Google re-writing titles for the main listing. They don't say where Google gets data specifically for sitelinks.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jul 17, 2017 at 9:26

1 Answer 1

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2

Google uses link anchor text. It usually uses the anchor text that is found on the home page, but it may take anchor text that is in a menu on many pages.

In this case, the site has the link with that anchor text in their footer:

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