Google is adjusting my meta title, help!

As you may have already noticed, Google has started adjusting the title tags in the search results with other relevant text from the relevant page on your website.

Google often replaces the meta title by the H1 tag of the page. It has been known for some time that Google adjusted meta titles in the search results by making minor adjustments, such as adding the name of a company to the end of the meta title. However, Google is now replacing the meta titles with other texts.

In mid-August we first noticed that Google was adjusting meta titles in this way, several of them SEO specialists also noted that Google not only uses the H1 tag in the meta title, but also, for example, an anchor text of an internal link.

How harmful is this to your SEO?

At this time it is still too early to draw firm conclusions about Google's rewriting of title tags. It is known that Google experiments more often with new applications (A/B testing) in live search results. It is therefore quite possible that this will disappear again in the long term.

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However, it could also be that this is the beginning of a permanent change. To answer the question of whether you should worry? At the moment the meta title is still very relevant, Mueller (Analyst at Google) recently said the following:

Titles are important! They are important for SEO. They are used as a ranking factor. Of course, they are definitely used as a ranking factor, but it is not something where I'd say the time you spend on tweaking the title is really the best use of your time.

We can therefore conclude that changes are taking place, but it is not yet possible to say what exactly this will bring in the future. We do know that it is still important to pay enough attention to the meta title and, as you now know, the H1 tags on your page.