Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24739709-20151201202536/@comment-26321732-20151211232637

Chiming in here to give a little more context for the change and address some valid concerns in the comments here.

Search algorithms are changed often in an effort to serve search engine users rather than sites, so sometimes techniques that brought us success in the past need to be abandoned. In the past our title tags were in line with best practices, but those best practices have changed as the algorithm evolved.

In fact, Google and other search engines issue algorithmic penalties to sites that are over-optimized because in the past excessive internal links or long lists of keywords were used to mislead searchers.

In all things SEO, it is important consider the purpose of each element to be optimized&mdash;and the purpose of a title is to provide a short description of that document to search engines. Search engines display the first 70 or so characters that appear in the title tag on their results pages and this is the only thing most searchers read before making a snap decision.

Google's documentation clearly states that page titles should be descriptive and concise.

"Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. [ . . . ] Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like " - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts" contains a lot of uninformative text."

"Brand your titles, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, "ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle." But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query" (emphasis mine).

Our communities' pages succeed in organic search because of the countless hours editors and admins spend creating unique, engaging content that provides the best possible answer to searchers' queries. Removing extra terms from the title tag will not change that.

Changes like this can seem sudden, but clean and concise titles are a tried and true SEO best practice. I am confident that removing confusing signals from the title gives each page the best possible chance to rank as high as possible for relevant search terms.