As you may remember, in August 2021 Google changed the algorithm it uses to determine your title links (tags) in the search results (which they later confirmed and later explained what changed) and it caused huge complaints in the SEO community. A couple months later, Google toned down some of those title changes for the better but they are still not where they were.
Still, SEOs still want to opt out of the title changes – not just because of conversion optimization and click through optimization purposes, but as we discussed, also legal reasons.
John Mueller of Google was asked again about the legal issues around Google changes your title links without your consent. What if you need to have a specific title link in Google Search because your lawyers tell you so? What can you do if Google changes it and you have no real way to change it back to the way you need it?
John said “there is no mechanism” to change the title links, even for legal reasons. Here are those tweets:
No, there is no mechanism for that. Sorry.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 27, 2022
Several months after this happened, we were hopeful that Google would provide a mechanism, either through Google Search Console or a meta tag of some sorts. But no, it has not come and it doesn’t seem like it is coming.
So what can you do? I guess you can try to tweak the title tag a bit to see if it nudges Google to change it in the title link in the search results? But outside of that, if Google changes your title link and legal is on your back about what the title link says in Google Search, there is not much you can do right now about it.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
