Titles and descriptions Google keeps

Google rewrites page titles it does not like. It shortens them, swaps in the H1, or builds a new one from links and headings. We have watched this happen across thousands of pages on the sites we run, and we have watched it stop when the titles changed. These are the rules we now write titles and descriptions by.

One target phrase per page

Before a title is written, the page has one search phrase it is for. Not three, not a slogan. "Next.js web development in Bangkok" is a target. "Power pillars" is not. Pages with two targets rank for neither; pages with none get a title Google invents.

The phrase goes in the title, in the H1 and in the first paragraph, in the words a searcher would type. Synonyms and the longer phrases go in the H2s, not the title.

The title is the H1's lead-in

When the title and the H1 say different things, Google picks one and it is usually not the title. So the H1 starts with the title text. On a long page the H1 can continue after a colon or a line break, but the first words are the title.

That also means the title has to read well on the page, which kills most clever titles before they are written.

Measured lengths

• Titles: 60 characters or fewer, including the brand suffix. Google truncates by pixel width, not characters, but 60 is a safe ceiling for Latin text.
• Descriptions: between 120 and 155 characters. Under 120 wastes the space; over 155 gets cut mid-sentence.
• For Chinese, Japanese and Korean the numbers are different (roughly 22 to 32 for titles and 60 to 99 for descriptions) and padding them to Latin lengths makes them worse.

We do not trust anyone to count, including ourselves. A script reads every page after every build and fails the deploy when a length is out of range. Models cannot count characters either, so generated descriptions go through the same measured loop until they fit.

No full stops, no emoji, no slogans

A title is a label, not a sentence. Full stops in titles get stripped or cause a rewrite. Emoji are removed by Google before display. Slogans ("Own your market today") tell the searcher nothing about the page and get replaced with something from the H1.

The description answers the query

A description is the sentence a searcher reads to decide whether to click. It says what the page is, for whom, and what they get. The brand goes at the end or not at all. Numbers help when they are real and dated. "Fixed quotes, our own sites as proof" beats "unparalleled results".

Brand suffix, once

The suffix " — 2BKK" is added in one place in the code. When two layers both add it, the title reads "Page — 2BKK — 2BKK". Our own launch checklist caught exactly that on this site, which is why the check is in the script now.

Check it after launch

Search Console shows the title Google displays. If it differs from yours on a page that matters, the page has more than one target, the H1 disagrees with the title, or the title is too long. Fix the page, not the tag.