SEO finding
Most words of the title do not occur in the text of the page
SEO Warning Severity: Medium
Part of the audit Keyword use on the page. Finding id: seo.titleTermsAbsentFromText.
What it costs you
A title that names something the text does not cover promises more than the page gives. Visitors leave, and search engines may show a title of their own instead of yours.
What to do
Make the title name what the page is about, or add to the page what the title promises.
What it checks
- Title words missing from page text
How to fix it
Bring title and text together
- Read [url] and decide what it is about.
- If the title is right, the text is missing: write about what the title names.
- If the text is right, rewrite the title in the words the text uses.
- If many pages of one template are reported, the template builds the title from a field that does not describe the page.
How to check: Recrawl the page and run this rule again.
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 |
|---|---|---|
min_title_terms | 2 | Titles with fewer content words than this are not judged. |
max_absent_share | 0.5 | A page is reported when more than this share (0 to 1) of the content words of its title is absent from the main text. |
How to verify by hand
Read the page. If it covers what the title names in other words, close the finding.
What this relies on
A title describes the page, so its words come back in the text.