SEOHow Bing Chooses Your Webpage Titles

How Bing Chooses Your Webpage Titles

A new blog post from Bing explains how they choose the titles for webpages, and why they might replace the one you've selected with something entirely different.

It can be frustrating for webmasters to carefully craft the perfect title for a page, only to have a search engine decide to replace it with what they consider to be a better one. So Bing has published a new blog post explaining how they choose the titles for webpages, and why they might replace yours with something else.

In one example, Bing chose to move the company’s name from the end of the title, where the company placed it, to the front of the title instead, when a searcher was searching specifically for the company name.

Query: Contoso

The Contoso webmaster has set the Title tag as:

Home Ware: Bedroom, Kitchenware, Garden Ware, Hardware – Contoso’s

The title Bing selected may look like this:

Contoso’s – Home Ware: Bedroom, Kitchenware, Garden Ware …

This does provide a better user experience for the searcher, as they might have missed the fact it was the Contoso website if the company name were all the way at the end of the title.

OpenGraph is used by Bing in its search titles as well. Webmasters using OpenGraph annotations should always check to ensure that the fields are valid and correct to avoid any problems with titles stemming from wrong annotations.

Bing also selects different titles from a variety of external sources that they use. This includes ODP/DMOZ listing information and anchor text. Unfortunately, it can be hard to change your Open Directory Project information if it is outdated and that is what Bing selects to display.

They also remind webmasters not to block the Bingbot, as it will also affect displayed titles. If this happens, they will instead display an extremely short title, such as simply the company name without any keywords.

Bing does suggest that webmasters remove generic titles, including “home” and “about us,” and instead use something that’s descriptive without being too long or repetitive. Additionally, Webmasters should always avoid having multiple pages with identical titles.

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