BLUE: “Title not branded”

Hello!

Try this search query in Google:
Reddit aww cats

In the search results, all titles will be branded with - Reddit, even though Reddit didn’t add this to their titles. Google did this for them, and Google is doing this for more and more sites.

This issue got out of hand in these support forums and via email, to name a few: “Titles don’t work! Google doesn’t pick up my title! What’s wrong with the titles? Google changed my title!”

Once Google asserts what your brand name is “ought” to be, they’ll start appending your brand name to your titles. This means that your titles may be trimmed, changed, and other sporadic things may happen. It is why we started warning about this because all our other readings are rendered inconsistent and unreliable.

So, yes, it’s verbatim: You should brand your titles. It’s up to you to honor this, however.

For the SEO Bar, blue is informational. The blue title-assertion is currently only used for unbranded titles. When there are other issues, even if the title is unbranded, it will no longer be blue.

I completely understand that some brand names are very long and that may take up most of the available pixels. There’s not much we can do about this, however.

There’s an upside: If (a large part of) the brand name is part of the title, then you don’t have to append or prepend the brand name. Here are a few examples:

Buy our latest BrandName item
Why we at BrandName do something
Meet the team behind BrandName

Google also has an information page (to which we link to via the plugin) on how to create good titles: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624.

Lastly, if you find that Google doesn’t append the brand name for you, then you can safely ignore our blue informational message.

I hope this all clears things up! Cheers ??

OK, thanks for the helpful response.
Just one more question. How does Google determine the brand name? Do they use the site title or is there a more refined approach?
And how does TSF do the same? Just comparing if the site title is part of the page titel?

Hi Andre,

That’s four questions! ??

Google never told us how they obtain brand names. But, I think it can be from the homepage h1 tags, HTML breadcrumbs, structured data, linked profiles, etc. They refer to their data-linking as the “Knowledge Graph.”

And yes, TSF picks up the site name set at /wp-admin/options-general.php and tests for its presence in the full title. Since themes also use this (sometimes in odd ways), we’re considering a different approach, where you can override that title for SEO branding only.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain everything. Greatly appreciated.