Are title tags a Google ranking factor?

An association between page titles and Google search rankings exists as strongly today as it did in the early days of SEO.

People of all SEO knowledge levels agree that optimizing page titles is vital to search success.

And how can you argue?

Page titles are the most visible component of Google’s search results pages (SERPs); it is easy to conclude that they carry weight as a ranking factor.

But, more optimization is not necessarily better. Optimization can cross the line into manipulation. That’s when you’re writing for search engines before real people.

Google historically devalues ​​ranking factors when the level of manipulation reaches a point where it is dragging down the quality of search results.

A good example of this is domain names, which Google valued so highly that it was difficult to rank them without keywords in your URL.

That’s a thing of the past, and now it’s just as possible to rank with an obscure brand name in your URL as it is with a keyword-based domain.

As Google search matures, it’s logical to wonder if page titles might go in a similar direction. Will Google eventually tire of spam and reduce the weight of the page title ranking factor?

Who knows what the future holds, but we haven’t reached that point yet. There is no question about Google’s algorithms considering page titles.

Instead, the questions around page titles are:

The extent to which title tags are valued. How much they matter to the overall picture of a website’s search optimization.

In this piece, we aim to answer these questions by investigating various claims and looking at Google’s recorded statements.

[Deep Dive:] The Complete Guide to Google Ranking Factors

The claim: Title tags are a ranking factor

The title of a page is the text that appears in the