The importance of the TITLE tag

In my experiments in SEO I found that the TITLE tag plays an important role in getting Impressions converted into Clicks.

When submitting a new page for indexing, with an expressed desire to update the SERP, I have been seeing inconsistant behaviour. When I did this for the Parish Council the SERP was updated with the new text in the TITLE tag. When I tried it with the "Thatcher" page it did not.

The SERP did update after re-indexing and the text was changed from what it was before but it was not the text from the TITLE tag. I did not change the text in the TITLE tag but I am not sure if Google was comparing the same versions of the page when it did its re-index. I had changed the page since the first time that it was indexed but I don't think that I had added the text I wanted to be reflected in the SERP.

Second attempt

In some ways it was good that the text that I wanted was not updated as it was too soon in my experiment for it to be found by someone making a search. I had added "do not hire this mann" as I wanted that to appear in the search.

I changed it back to "Master Thatcher" to see if that gets put in the SERP on re-index. I also did not re-submit the page for urgent re-index as I was still not ready for the page to appear when a search was made.

Multiple versions of the Google index

It was also observered that there are more than one index in Google for the same page as the text in the SERP (not that from the TITLE as that was the same) was not the same when I made different searches. For example I got a different SERP when I searched for "????? ?????? Thatcher" and "Thatcher Belchamp Walter". Both searches returned the same page but neither had the text from the TITLE tag. The text appearing at the top of the SERP listing was the same for both searches and was the text that I had in the H1 tag?????