Dan Petrovic ·
23 April 2014
Can anchor text influence uninformative title tag replacement?
In 2012 we examined Google's document title rewriting behaviour in order to create a list of contributing factors.
In the follow-up experiment we've focused on one signal only - anchor text.
What we did:
Link to this page using anchor text "Banana": https://dejanmarketing.com/untitled.html
Specifics
The target page has an actual title called "Untitled Document". You can see it in Google Webmaster Tools screenshot defined as "non-informative":
Result Monitoring
We monitored these three search queries:
On the 14th day of our experiment, one of the participants reported a new title on the site: function results which included the value from inbound link anchor text, "banana".
I couldn't see the same result at the time of writing this article, but did notice the change for info:
Why didn't Google highlight the word "banana" in the following search results? Let us know here.
This experiment wouldn't be possible without the help of the following people:
We're still wearing a manual action for our last experiment involving inbound links which pass PageRank:
We'll probably be slapped with another one, so in order to protect our participants I have asked them to remove their links now that the experiment has been finalised.
