How to change how your website appears on Google

Google calls the headline of a result the title link. Its documentation lists the sources it draws on: the page’s <title> element, the main visual title, heading elements, og:title, and the text of links that point to the page.

Google replaces a title it judges unhelpful. The cases it names include half-empty titles, obsolete ones, inaccurate ones and the same boilerplate repeated on many pages. A title that is specific to the page and agrees with the page’s main heading is the one most likely to be shown as written. Our guide to writing title tags and meta descriptions covers the wording.

Google calls the text under the title the snippet, and says snippets are “primarily created from the page content itself”. The meta description is used when Google thinks it describes the page more accurately than text taken from the page.

A meta description cannot be forced into the result. Writing one for every page, in words that match what the page delivers, is what makes it the likelier choice.

The name shown above the address comes from Google’s site name system. Google says WebSite structured data on the home page is the most important signal for stating a preference, with a name and, if wanted, an alternateName for a shorter form. Site names apply to a whole domain or subdomain, never to a folder. Our guide to schema markup explains the format.

The small image beside the site name is the favicon. Google requires a square image of at least 8 by 8 pixels and recommends one larger than 48 by 48. Our guide to a favicon not showing in Google lists the reasons one fails to appear.

The extra links to inner pages are sitelinks, and Google states that they are automated. Our guide to getting sitelinks covers what a site can do to earn them.

Nothing in a result changes until Google has crawled the page again. Google’s figure is anywhere from several days to several weeks. For one important page, the URL Inspection tool in Search Console has a button to request indexing, which asks Google to come sooner.