An SEO professional asked John Mueller about changing article headlines, during a hangout.
First, their main question was about the page title with the company name – should they add the company name to the page title?
John explained that he believes doing something like this can make sense. However, he also said that Google will add the title to the page automatically.
The SEO pro’s second question is: some of their competitors are copying their articles and rewriting the main header or page title within the article. It appears that they are showing above the professional’s site in the search results.
Their question is: is it a good practice to rewrite the title or the header inside the article?
John explained that just rewriting the headline would not make it a good article, and that you should not be seeing any SEO benefit just from changing your headlines.
This happens at approximately the 14:31 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 4 14:31
Okay, so I have small questions. First, should the title be with the company name? We are in the news industry. And should we add like to each title, the company name, like we are like, test the news, or Dutch news? This is the first you can answer. It’s a small yes or no, I think.
John 14:55
I think it makes sense. So when we show a title link for a website, if it’s for a kind of a lower level page, we will try to show the name of the website as well in the title that we show. So if you add it yourself, then you kind of like, already include that information. So I think…
SEO Professional 4 15:18
Yes. Okay, so I think it’s yes. The second thing, some of our competitors like copying the article and pasting it again on their website, but they rewrite the main header or the title inside the article. So they are showing before us in the search results. Is it a good practice to do that, like rewrite the title, the header title inside the article or the–or the main title inside the article?
John 15:46
I don’t know. I mean, if they’re copying your content, then I don’t think that’s a good practice. So from that point of view, I don’t think just rewriting the headline would make it a good article. If they’re really copying your full content, I might also look into the DMCA process to see if that applies there.
SEO Professional 4 16:12
Actually, I applied the three or four copyright removals and they were removed and Google removed their articles. But for the first two or three days, they are showing up before us in our article, like there is–because they just are rewriting. So I thought, should we do that? So I think it’s a no, we should not.
John 16:33
I mean, you can change the headlines of your articles anytime. That’s up to you. But I don’t think you would see an advantage of changing the headlines just purely from changing the headlines.
