I like finding Google’s limits. I ran a quick test to see if Google will use any Header Tag as a page title if for some reason it does not like the page title element you give it (as I thought it might).
The result was if the title element is malformed, Google will use any available Header, be it a H1, H2, H3 H4 H5 or H6 as the page title.
The snippet below shows Google using a H6 as the page title. Some other interesting observations to follow but for now check out how Yahoo & MSN Bing handle a malformed title.
New to HTML? Check out SEO & H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6.
More Reading:
- Home Page Title Is Wrong In Google Search Results
- How Many Characters In A Page Title For Google SEO?
- How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?
- Dynamic Titles In Google SERP Snippet
- How Google, Yahoo & MSN Handle Title Snippets If They Choke
- No Page Title In Google Results
- Google Will Use H1,H2,H3,H4,H5 & H6 Headers As Titles
- How Many Title Tag Characters Will Google Display in a Search Snippet
Wow this is stunning information. Looks like what”s happened is google really doesn’t like your page title and has chosen something else. This looks like a pretty good thing to do in most cases when the title is irrelevant or perhaps gibberish.
Cool, nice little test ;)
Cheers – Love doing that stuff…. and as I say, got a few things to add :)
Interesting test. Surprised you are doing it on a legit domain though. I didn’t know they would fall-back to H tags. I think that the precedence must go something like this: title h1-h6 incoming link text title tags of other sites on the server I saw a site managed by a “professional seo company” that accidently had a noindex robots.txt on it … for about 3 – 4 months. Think the site had also taken a hit for hacked links on DeviantArt, Google had decided that the title of the site was going to be something like: “LinkBanba Premium Web Directory” The same company had a site that had no title tag and all the content was loaded via AJAX, in this case Google decided to use another site on the same server’s title tag.
Thanks for the comment David. Surprised? I’m not doing anything fishy – I’m just reporting how Google handles page elements. Yeah I saw a professonal SEO company doing the same thing – but funnier :)
For good optimization you should always run the heading H1-H6 But why use H4-H6. I’ve found that there should only be one H1 but as many H2 as you like With a H3 in you footer combined with bullet points and bold text.
I too use H1-h3. Here’s an example of what you can do with H1-H6 :)
@Richard Ball This comment obviously depends on what your definition of a footer is. If it’s where you put all your copyrighted information such as company, vat and telephone numbers then you shouldn’t have any H(n) in there at all. If you take a look at newer languages, such as HTML5 then you will see that pages do not validate when you put have placed an H(n) in the footer element.
Supercool stuff. Please change that ‘soes’ to ‘does’ :-)