Most SEOs often look at titles tags when browsing web sites, I mean, I do, while the average person does not. So you’ve probably seen numbers in the tab bar representing an unread direct message count or chat request. Well, Shopify sites using chat-bot script was adding a 1 to the titles of pages and that is what Google has been indexing.
Caio Barros from Google posted about it in the Google Webmaster Help forums saying “some Shopify websites are showing a (1) in the titles of search results.”
In short, this chat feature was adding a (1) to the title tags when Googlebot was crawling the pages. Google then indexed and displayed the (1) in the search results. Since then, the chat feature removed the (1) from the title tag and thus when Googlebot recrawls and indexes the pages the (1) should no longer be in the title tag and Google will eventually stop showing (1) in the title name in the search results.
Caio Barros said:
We have been receiving some reports of a “(1)” showing up in some titles in search results. Upon some investigation, our Product Experts noticed that this behavior happened to websites built in Shopify and were using a chat app. It looks like these sites used a chat-bot script which added a “(1)” to the page’s title element. Titles changed with JavaScript can still be picked up, and used as title links in Search.
However, it looks like that script has been fixed to no longer change the page’s title element, so as Googlebot reprocess pages, it will no longer see the “(1)” as a part of the pages’ title, and we can take that into account when generating title links in Search. Keep in mind that title links in Search aren’t always exactly the same as the title element of a page, so it’s not guaranteed that Google will drop that element immediately after reprocessing.
There’s no need to do anything special to have pages reprocessed. This should happen automatically over time. We crawl and reprocess pages at different rates, usually you’ll see important pages like a site’s homepage reprocessed fairly quickly, within a few days at most. Other pages may take longer to be reprocessed.
John Mueller added a tip on Twitter saying Title-tip: if you use a widget/script that changes your page titles, those changed titles can be picked up for search too.”
Here is how I see the title of that tweet in my tab bar, although, although Googlebot is not fed that information – thus it has a normal title name in the search results.
But Google shows it right because Twitter didn’t show it to Googlebot:
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
