Went through GSC and a manual SERP check on about 80 blog posts, and Google is showing a different title than mine on roughly 30 of them. Mostly it’s pulling the H1 or cutting the brand name, but on a few it grabbed a random subheading which reads terrible.
My titles are around 55-65 characters, keyword first, brand at the end with a pipe. Not doing anything weird.
Has anyone actually gotten Google to stop rewriting by changing something specific, or is it just random and not worth the time?
In my experience the H1/title mismatch is the biggest trigger. If the title says one thing and the H1 says something slightly different, it often just picks the H1. I aligned them on about 40 pages last year and rewrites dropped to maybe a handful. The ones pulling random subheadings were usually pages where the title didn’t really match what the page was about anymore after updates.
That lines up, most of my rewritten ones have H1s that were written separately by the content team. going to align 10 of them as a test and check again in a few weeks. thanks
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