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Is Keyword-Heavy Meta Titles Against Google Guidelines?

Is Keyword-Heavy Meta Titles Against Google Guidelines?

Discover how Google is looking into a website that is keyword-heavy, meta titles and meta descriptions by Google’s John Muller (hint: they are not against webmaster guidelines).

Google’s John Mueller clears up a misunderstanding about keyword-heavy titles and descriptions, saying it’s a common practice that’s not against webmaster guidelines.

This topic is addressed during the Google Search Central SEO live stream held on December 11. An SEO tells Mueller they see small businesses saturate their titles and descriptions with commercial keywords all the time, even after advising them not to do so.

They give an example of a florist in Brighton having a description that reads: “wedding flowers Brighton, funeral flowers Brighton, anniversary flowers Brighton, birthday flowers Brighton,” and so forth.

Aesthetically it doesn’t look right, the SEO tells Mueller, but it’s not uncommon to see pages with those kinds of descriptions rank highly in search results.

Mueller is asked why keyword saturated titles and descriptions are so prevalent in search results, and whether or not they’re against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Here is his response.

Mueller Discusses Keyword-Heavy Titles and Descriptions

Without mincing words, Mueller says saturating a page’s meta title and description with keywords is not against Google’s guidelines. It’s not even something Google considers to be problematic.

That’s not to say Google recommends this practice either, as filling the title and description with keywords can make it more difficult to understand what the page is actually relevant for.

Mueller says the biggest improvement a site could hope to see by rewriting those titles and descriptions is a better click-through rate. He repeatedly recommends writing better meta tags to improve CTR, but never suggests doing so to improve rankings.

Read more here.

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