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Do you know of web sites that use a strategy of showing a different title tag on the desktop version of a page, compared to the mobile version of that exact same page? Well, John Mueller of Google had to take a step back when someone asked about doing such a thing.
On Twitter John Mueller said "Taking a step back, why are you using separate title tags for desktop vs mobile?" He said, let's take away mobile-first indexing - still, why would you do such a thing? What is the rational. The response was that they were told to do so by management. But why? I don't understand it either.
Maybe they wanted shorter title tags for a different length headline snippet in Google's mobile results? I am trying to figure out why.
Here is the communication:
We only use the content visible to mobile Googlebot, so if you have different titles, we'd use the mobile ones.
— 🌠John 🌠(@JohnMu) November 7, 2018
Taking a step back, why are you using separate title tags for desktop vs mobile? (Even before we'd only index the URLs with one title, the desktop one.)
— 🌠John 🌠(@JohnMu) November 7, 2018
And it becomes very tough to tell them not to do it because they simply say what's the problem for SEO when Google bot is fetching from desktop and we using it in mobile .... Also they defend it by saying they doing it for user convenience......
— Neeraj Pandey (@neeraj333) November 7, 2018
You think you've seen it all when you report on SEO for almost 15 years and something new comes up every day.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
