During the last Google Webmaster Hangout session an interesting question came up. Just how important is the title tag for Google? Here’s what Google’s John Mueller had to say about the topic:
We use that just as a part. I think it’s not like the primary ranking factor of a page, to put it that way. We do use it for ranking, but it’s not the most critical part of a page. So it’s not worthwhile filling it with keywords to kind of hope that it works that way. In general, we try to recognize when a title tag is stuffed with keywords because that’s also a bad user experience for users in the search results. If they’re looking to understand what these pages are about and they just see a jumble of keywords, then that doesn’t really help.
In a nutshell – Google only uses your title when it’s really something that they believe is a great showcase about what that page features. Furthermore they don’t like keyword stuffed title’s at all – even if those keywords are extremely relevant to the page’s content. Frankly Google rewrites the titles most of the time anyway, especially for mobile users.
What’s most important to note here is that John says that Google doesn’t have much trouble ranking a website that doesn’t have a title tag at all. Google’s own algorithm uses the pages content to assign an appropriate title to display in search results.
Check out the full video regarding this topic here.