If Google fail to show updated titles from sites for a particular search, is it likely to be less competitive for me to rank?

Question

Noticing I clicked a page and got redirected to a different URL from the Google search result, where the search term is what I'm currently trying to jump in to the ranking, I'm wondering that is there any correlation between Google not updating URLs on a search query and how competitive it is in terms of keyword difficulty.

I'm guessing that Google has tendency to ignore an indexed site's URL (or description, or even the title) updates. It means that the search query does is not worth updating so frequently for Google or for users. So, I could make an assumption that the search query is easy to rank (or not easy to rank) from a SERP result with a many of (or barely none of) inactive ranked top pages.

Is my guess correct? Is there any research or findings regarding of this?

Answer 1

I dont have any problems with my websites. The first thing to remember that the title and description are suggestions to Google. It decides, with its own algorithms what to display. It looks like its looking for correlation between the url, title, description and contents (amongst other things).

Why Google Sometimes Ignores Your Titles and Descriptions Remember what we said before. The title tag and meta description are merely suggestions for what the search engines should display in the results. Google and Bing and other search engines are under no obligation to display exactly what you want them to display. In fact, in many cases, the search engines won’t display the title tag and meta description you specified.

From Why Doesn’t Google Use My Title Tag and Meta Description In Search Results?

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The other thing I have noticed is that if you have characters such as brackets, braces and dashes in your title, Google will split it and not all parts may show up in the Search.

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If you have changed the title and the new title does not reflect the page any better (in Google algorithms) then it may not update it in the search. I ensure that whatever is in the title, occurs a decent number of times in the page. And each pages title is clearly unique.