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See the page titles Google is actually using for your news articles with the News Dashboard

Google recently confirmed they can and will create their own page titles for your articles when displaying them.

Let that sink in.

First spotted by multiple SEOs on Twitter, Google Search Central now says:

“Also, while we’ve gone beyond HTML text to create titles for over a decade, our new system is making even more use of such text. In particular, we are making use of text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page.

What does this mean for news publishers? Despite carefully crafting page titles, Google might slice and dice or completely overwrite what you’ve written. And since there isn’t a notification process, you won’t know when Google does this.

So, what’s the answer? The News Dashboard.

How to use The News Dashboard to track title changes

Using our Index Rate report, you can track how Google adds your stories to its news index, including with which title.

Additionally, our Action View lets you monitor – on an every 15-minute basis –  how your content that’s ranked in the last 24 hours appears on the first page of the SERP; and the Google News report does the same for news.google.com surface.

You can then look at that same data in aggregate, or in 15-minute increments, in our KPI Dashboard visibility reports.

Of course, if you have any questions about news SEO or the changes Google implements to SERPS and Google News, reach out!

Read more

Most common news ranking types on the Google SERP

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