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With the caveat that this is a 7-yo thread -- I'd say that it's generally more of a filter these days (vs. a Capital-P penalty). The OEM or large resellers are almost always going to win these battles, and you'll be at a disadvantage if you duplicate their product descriptions word-for-word.

Can you still rank? Sure, but you're going to have an easier time if you can add some original value. If you aren't allowed to modify the info, is there anything you can add to it -- custom reviews (not from users, but say an editorial-style review), for example? You don't have to do it for thousands of products. You could start with ten or 25 top sellers and see how things go.

Don't have an exact date, but the UI feature is relatively new. I agree with @effectdigital that this is a general capability that Google has been building/expanding for a while. It's helpful to look at that underlying logic, as it will spawn new features over time.

Unfortunately, some keyword research tools may strip that special character out, so I'd be a little wary of the results. It may not reflect what Google does in all cases.

While this is interesting (especially to me and others who like to dig into the nuances of search), I'm not sure if it helps you much practically. I don't think a typical searcher is every going to enter "¾" (or, if some do, it's incredibly low volume).

Can you provide a context? Over the past couple of years, Google has started to treat symbols differently depending on the context. I've seen weird situations with the $ sign, for example.

In some cases, Google will try to actually do the math and pull up calculator functions, for example. However, the handle a search like [3/4" wrench] pretty well and seem to understand the context (and match it to '3/4' in title tags, etc.).

Sure do

How to Write Meta Descriptions in a Constantly Changing World

Unfortunately, we don't have much guidance from Google at this point on the "Interesting Finds" section. It seems to be news-like, but as with "Top Stories," taps sites and articles beyond traditional news sites. It's very likely that AMP is a factor.

Anecdotally, the articles seem to be more of a mix of recent and evergreen than "Top Stories" do. It almost seems more connected to "In-depth Articles," which disappeared last year. When the articles aren't recent, they seem to be longer, more in-depth pieces.

I know this has been a couple of years, but just a heads up that we've written a more permanent resource about this question on the Moz blog (as it seems to come up periodically):

Can You Reverse A 301 Redirect?

The only semi-consistent story we're seeing is some minor reversals from the August 1st update, but even that's not clear. I'd say that, if you were hit by August 1st, I'd pay closer attention, but that's about as strong a statement as I'd make.

In general, unless there's something really obvious, like an error in Google Search Console, then you're looking at traffic changes and ranking changes. Both can have not only seasonal but day-of-week and even hour-by-hour variations, so it's important to track any change over time.

In this case, it did look like the March 12 core update rolled out in 1-2 days, followed by a relatively quiet period of algorithm flux, so I don't think this is a sustained roll-out. If you were hit, you'd be seeing it by now, I suspect. That said, note that ranking changes may take longer to see, depending on how often your data is updated (we're weekly in Moz Pro).

Yeah, that's the one I'm familiar with, and is the only big change I'm aware of in the past year. Haven't heard any chatter about location switching since then. There have been some changes that impact how Google handle locations for automated SERP collection, but most of those don't impact regular searches.

Ok, I think I see what you're saying, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Google. If I go directly to a page like this one (even incognito):

https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf/books/where-the-watermelons-grow/?id=9780062665867

...and then go to the home page, I still see the book title in the browser tab. The title tag itself looks ok, but the sight is highly dynamic. I'm guessing this is some kind of strange JavaScript rewrite or something else happening in your code. Unfortunately, it would take an in-depth knowledge of your site code to sort out why.

Is the site using AJAX or something similar? Definitely seems like pages are being created dynamically and not loading in a typical way.

What search query are you using? I'm only seeing five pages indexed for your entire site (using site:www.shelfstuff.com), and can't get your site to rank at all for "Zach King: My Magical Life".

Oh, wait, sorry -- are you talking about the display title in the SERPs or the actual title that appears in the browser window once someone enters your site?

Just a note that we've discontinued the old Crawl Test tool and have launched an entirely new On-Demand Crawl tool based on our upgraded Site Crawl engine (launched last year). The new tool has an enhanced UI, entirely rebuilt back-end, full export capability, and will save your old crawls for up to 90 days.

We've written up a sample case study or logged-in customers can go directly to On-Demand Crawl.

Just a note that we've discontinued the old Crawl Test tool and have launched an entirely new On-Demand Crawl tool based on our upgraded Site Crawl engine (launched last year). The new tool has an enhanced UI, entirely rebuilt back-end, full export capability, and will save your old crawls for up to 90 days.

We've written up a sample case study or logged-in customers can go directly to On-Demand Crawl.

If you're looking to crawl more than 3,000 pages, you can also use campaign-based Site Crawl in Moz Pro.

Just a note that we've discontinued the old Crawl Test tool and have launched an entirely new On-Demand Crawl tool based on our upgraded Site Crawl engine (launched last year). The new tool has an enhanced UI, entirely rebuilt back-end, full export capability, and will save your old crawls for up to 90 days.

We've written up a sample case study or logged-in customers can go directly to On-Demand Crawl.

Just a note that we've discontinued the old Crawl Test tool and have launched an entirely new On-Demand Crawl tool based on our upgraded Site Crawl engine (launched last year). The new tool has an enhanced UI, entirely rebuilt back-end, full export capability, and will save your old crawls for up to 90 days.

We've written up a sample case study or logged-in customers can go directly to On-Demand Crawl.

If you've been with Moz a while, you may have used our old Crawl Test tool. A year ago we launched an all new, campaign-based Site Crawl (with an entirely rebuild crawl engine), but Crawl Test fell into disrepair and we haven't had a solid tool for crawling non-campaign domains.

I'm happy to announce that we've just launched an all new On-Demand Crawl, built on the new Site Crawl engine, with a UI that's focused on quick insights. Moz Pro Standard tier customers can run up to 5 crawls per month at 3,000 page per crawl (crawls are saved for 90 days), with per-month limits increasing at higher levels.

Most On-Demand Crawls should run in a few minutes, making the tool perfect to get quick insights for sales meetings, vetting prospects, or analyzing competitors. We've written up a sample case study or logged-in customers can go directly to On-Demand Crawl.

Try it out -- we'd love to hear your use cases (either here or in the blog post comments).

From a product perspective, we tend to need to set guidelines that can be quantified, but I'm afraid the whole truth is never quite that black-and-white. All else being equal, I think keeping your titles to a reasonable length is beneficial. Long titles don't automatically harm you (there's no Capital-P penalty for it), but they tend to create a few problems:

(1) Often, long, CMS-generated titles front-load repetitive words (like the site name or category/sub-category), which devalues the unique/important words in Google's eyes and is more likely to make it look like duplicate content.

(2) Long titles tend to devalue important words for search visitors as well, which can harm click-through rates. I'm a firm believer that CTR has indirect impact on ranking over time. Even if it had no SEO significance, it's generally bad for engagement and for your site.

That said, it depends a lot on what you're dealing with. If a title of a page is, say, a title of a blog post, and it's just a long title, that's probably fine. If you have 5,000 product pages that all start with "Bob's Discount Propane Warehouse | Propane and Propane Accessories | ...", then that's going to be detrimental to your usability and SEO.

You mentioned images in your reply to Christy -- could you give a couple of examples of the types of pages and titles you're talking about? In general, image-only pages with no additional content (especially if they have near-duplicate titles) are going to be low-value from a search perspective.

CYNOT: I saw the original question via email (I'll avoid details in the public answer), and unfortunately I'm not seeing any clear signs of technical issues with the original content. This looks more like an aggressive filter than a penalty, but it's really hard to tell if the filter is a sign of quality issues or if Google is treating the wrong site as a duplicate.

Unfortunately, a lot of it does depend on the relative authority of the sites. People scrape (including some bots, which do it almost immediately) Moz posts all the time, and they rank, but they don't have nearly our link profile or other ranking signals, and so we don't worry about it. For a smaller site with a relatively new or weak link profile, though, it is possible for a stronger site to outrank you on your own content.

Google does try to look at cache dates and other signals, but a better-funded site can often get indexed more quickly as well. It's rare for this to do serious damage, but it can happen. As Balachandar said, at that point you may have to resort to DMCA take-down requests and other legal actions. Ultimately, that becomes a cost/benefit trade-off, as legal action is going to take time and money.

There's no technical tricks (markup, etc.) to tell Google that a page is the source, although there are certainly tactics, like maintaining good XML sitemaps, that can help Google find your new content more quickly. Of course, you also want to be the site that has that stronger link profile, regardless of whether or not someone is copying you.