SEO finding
Title, H1, social tags and schema name do not describe the same page
SEO Warning Severity: Medium
Part of the audit The page names itself differently in each place. Finding id: seo.pageIdentityDisagrees.
What it costs you
Search engines build the headline of your result from the title, the H1, og:title and structured data. When these name different things, they pick one or write their own, and shared links show the wrong text or picture.
What to do
Give every label of the page the same subject. Wording may differ; the thing described may not.
What it checks
- Title and main heading cover different topics
- Social share title taken from another page
- Data name is a leftover template default
- Social share address differs from preferred address
- Social share image missing or from another page
How to fix it
Set og:url from the canonical URL
- Print both tags from one variable, so they cannot drift apart.
- If og:url is a fixed text in the template, such as the home page address, replace it with the page's own canonical URL.
How to check: View the source of [url]: og:url equals the canonical.
Give the page an og:image
- Fill og:image from the page's own main image, with an absolute address.
- Where a page has no image, fall back to one default picture you chose for the site.
How to check: View the source of [url]: one og:image with an address that loads.
Fill every label from the page's own content
- Open [url] and decide what the page is about.
- Make the title and the H1 name that subject.
- Set og:title and the name in the structured data from the same field as the title, not from a fixed template text.
How to check: Run this rule again. Search for the page and compare the headline shown with the title.
A real case
Researchers at Zyppy compared 80,959 title tags on 2,370 sites with Google's results in early 2022 and found that Google showed its own rewrite for 61.6% of them. Titles that matched the page's H1 were rewritten less often.
Thresholds
| Name | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
title_h1_similarity | 0.1 | Below this similarity (0 to 1) title and H1 count as sharing no subject. |
label_similarity | 0.5 | Below this similarity (0 to 1) with the title, an og:title or a schema name counts as describing something else. |
min_pages_sharing_name | 3 | Pages that must carry the same schema name before it counts as a template default. |
min_pages_sharing_image | 2 | Pages that must carry the same og:image before it is reported as shared. |
How to verify by hand
Search results showing a rewritten title for the URL.
What this relies on
Title and H1 should describe the same subject; a label that shares nothing with the others was copied from a template.