Shopify websites with A (1) within the title in Google Search

Most SEOs often look at title tags when browsing websites, I mean I do, while the average person doesn’t. So you’ve probably seen numbers in the tab bar representing a count of unread direct messages or chat requests. Well, Shopify websites that use chat bot scripts added a 1 to the titles of pages, and that’s what Google indexed.

Google’s Caio Barros posted about it in the Google Webmaster Help Forums that say “Some Shopify sites show a (1) in the titles of the search results.”

In short, this chat feature added a (1) to the title tags when Googlebot crawled the pages. Google then indexed the (1) and displayed it in the search results. Since then, the chat feature has removed the (1) from the title tag, and when Googlebot re-crawls and indexes the pages, the (1) should no longer be in the title tag and Google will eventually stop using (1) in the Title names display the search results.

Caio Barros said:

We’ve had some reports of a “(1)” appearing in some titles in search results. During some research, our product experts found this behavior to occur on websites built in Shopify that used a chat app. It looks like these pages used a chat bot script that added a “(1)” to the page’s title element. Titles modified with JavaScript can still be retrieved and used as title links in search.

However, it looks like this script has been fixed so that it no longer changes the title element of the page, so when Googlebot reprocesses pages, it no longer sees the “(1)” as part of the page title, and that we can take into account when generating title links in the search. Keep in mind that title links in search don’t always exactly match a page’s title element, so there’s no guarantee that Google will delete that element immediately after reprocessing.

Nothing special is required to have pages reprocessed. This should happen automatically over time. We crawl and process pages at different rates. Typically you will see that important pages like the home page of a website are reprocessed fairly quickly, within a few days at the most. Reprocessing other pages may take longer.

John Mueller added a tip Twitter Say Title Tip: If you use a widget/script that changes your page titles, those changed titles can be applied to search as well.”

This is how I see the title of this tweet in my tab bar, even though Googlebot doesn’t get that information – hence it has a normal title name in the search results.

But Google shows it correctly because Twitter didn’t show it to Googlebot:

forum discussion below Google Webmaster Help.