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Google publishes new help documents on controlling titles and descriptions in search

Google has published two new documents to help publishers control what Google shows in the search results for the title and description of the listing. The company also introduced a new term for the title of a search result: “title link.”

The first document is named “Control your title links in search results” and it goes through best practices for writing title elements, how Google creates title links for the search results, how to avoid common issues and how to submit feedback to Google on this topic. The second new help document is named “Control your snippets in search results” and it covers how snippets are created, the differences between rich results and meta description tags, how to prevent snippets or adjust snippet length and the best practices for creating meta descriptions.

Why we care. These documents should provide additional clarity on how Google shows your search result snippets and how you can better control what comes up in Google Search. Also, having a designated name for titles in search results (“title link”) can help eliminate miscommunications among search marketers and Google.

Read more here.

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Crawl, slide, scream

So, that’s why there was a spike in “Crawled – currently not indexed.” At the end of September, some SEOs began noticing more “Crawled, Not Indexed” types of notices in their GSC reports. Google’s Daniel Waisberg investigated and Google has explained, via Twitter, that “This is because the Index Coverage report data is refreshed at a different (and slower) rate than the URL Inspection. The results shown in URL Inspection are more recent, and should be taken as authoritative when they conflict with the Index Coverage report.” And, data shown in the Index Coverage report should reflect the accurate status of a page within a few days.