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Some SEOs are noticing Google add to their title tags that are displayed in the Google search results snippet's headline a city name. Lily Ray posted about this on Twitter and said "I've seen Google modify title tags many times, but this is the 1st time I've seen Google append a city name to a title tag for a generic service page it *thinks* should have a local intent."
Here is her generic screen shot of this, so you can understand what is happening:
The NYC part is added, not part of the title attribute, in the source code.
I know Google can do whatever they want with titles and snippets but I don't know if I've seen this behavior for generic landing pages.
Others have not seen this as well:
Can see what you mean. Am noticing something similar for sites that I work on. There's definitely been a change of some sort within the past 24 hours.
— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) October 15, 2019
Seeing the same across several SERPs where we were previously ranking w/high quality national service pages. Dominated by hyperlocal aggregators and/or localized SMBs now. I'm contemplating a major strategy shift, but trying to not be overly reactive.
— Rhea Drysdale (@Rhea) October 14, 2019
Have you seen this?
Don't forget, the new snippet controls should roll out the end of this week.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
