Google Title Tag Updates Casualties Lose Search Traffic.

Google is not showing publisher title tags (commonly called SERPs) for less than 20% of search results. Some in the search marketing community have started calling Google’s title tag update a title pokelip because some sites are losing traffic, possibly to rewritten titles in SERPs.
Google Title Tag Update Crash.
Search marketer Lilly Ray tweeted about the casualties caused by Google’s update. He noted that clicks have dropped by more than 60,000 in the past week.
The site did not lose ranking, the average position remained the same.
The result is simple, the site lost traffic because Google rewrote the title tags.
Lily Ray calls Google’s updated title Poclipse.
The first major loss of Google title Poclipse:
This is a subfolder on an ecom site where
Tag Are closed for, which makes them look much worse on Google.
CTR decreased by .6% and clicks decreased by more than 60k!
(Average position remained the same) pic.twitter.com/6hl9YdqhlC.
– Lily Ray (ilylilyraynyc) August 25, 2021
Impressions are gained in a fluid, global, diffused way, but with fewer searches than some other metrics.
I imagine Amazon is seeing similar patterns. pic.twitter.com/RxQi6tfup7
– Lily Ray (ilylilyraynyc) August 25, 2021
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Invalid location in title tag.
There have been many complaints that Google has launched a Webmaster Help Forum discussion where publishers can focus on bad title tags in search results.
A publisher with a local public site with multiple locations noticed that Google was rewriting title tags and using the wrong location.
It is bad to have the wrong location in the SERP title because the user will not click on the search result when it shows the location of the city they are not looking for.
The discussion post states:
“Hello, The latest change in titles does not accurately represent the ‘brand attribute’ of the title. You are adding – regardless of the location of the search AAA Northern California. This business operates in several states outside of the Northern California area.” In these cases, the CTR has dropped significantly.
Google Tuesdays Health Topics
Google’s title tag update is particularly bad in the health sector. Google is adding the word “vaccination” to the title of pages that are about the disease but not about the disease vaccination.
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Hello. ooglegooglesearchc arch search M جانمو۔, Where is the best place to feed on annoying page titles in SERPs? For a healthcare client, it is converting condition pages (such as “flu”, “polio”) into condition + vaccine (“flu vaccination”). This is a big problem for YMYL content.
– Jenny deer (glagringaeterna) August 25, 2021
This is unnoticed by most people outside of search engine enthusiasts, but in this example:
Google has taken what the page is (‘Flu’), and rewritten it as they think * it should be (‘Flu Vaccination’).
It seems small (maybe again except Pro / Antivax) but; pic.twitter.com/aN8CoTll2o.
– Dan Barker (انDonBarker) August 25, 2021
Alphabetical errors
Search marketer Jennifer Slag tweeted to Google about incorrect capitalization in the SERP title, which resulted in small case words being combined with large case words.
One of the weird things about Google’s title tag update is that I’m seeing big headlines that don’t have capital letters, even for the first letter, and that sounds weird. pic.twitter.com/iBaCWdAfzu.
– Jennifer Slag (Jane Starr) August 21, 2021.
Screenshot of lower case titles.
Screenshot of the webpage showing the upper case.
I checked the code of the web page and the title does not have a mix of upper case and lower case on the page. The weird shape of the title in the SERP is entirely a fault of Google’s algorithm.
Was Google’s title tag algorithm fast?
Many errors have been reported by the publishing and search community and it is tempting to conclude that this particular unannounced algorithm update has not been fully tested.
Google reportedly has thousands of search quality ratings. One would think that some of these errors, especially in health and medicine sensitive areas, would have been noticed and corrected before the update began.
Is this a sign that Google has little faith in its algorithm?
Reference
Official Google Title Poclipse Help Discussion.