I changed my page title days ago but search results still show the old one. Did I do something wrong?
Probably not. A search result does not change the moment you save your edit; it changes after the engine comes back, visits your page and reads the new tags, which can take days or longer. You need to do two things: confirm the live page really contains the new title, then request a recrawl through the webmaster tools the engine provides. The preview tool itself never contacts any search engine.
Step one: is the new title actually live?
Often the cause is on your side, not the engine's: the edit was saved in the wrong field, or in a draft that was never published, or the store's cache is still serving the old version. Check for yourself:
- Open the published page in a private window, where you are not logged in to your store dashboard.
- View the page source from the browser menu, or type view-source: before the URL on a computer.
- Search the source for the word title until you reach the title tag.
- Compare what you find, character by character, with the tag you copied from the tool.
If you entered the title Cambodian Oud Oil 12 ml | Oud Store in the Search snippet preview, this is what you should find in the source:
<title>Cambodian Oud Oil 12 ml | Oud Store</title>
If you find the old title, the problem is saving or publishing, and the fix is in your platform, not with the engine. If you find two titles in the source, you may have added a tag by hand while the platform writes its own; remove one.
Step two: ask for a fresh visit
The major search engines offer site owners free tools once you verify you own the site, and through them you can usually inspect a specific URL and request that it be indexed again. A request does not guarantee a date, but it tells the engine the page has changed. If your site has a sitemap, updating the last-modified date for the pages you changed gives an extra signal. You can build the sitemap with that date in the XML sitemap generator, provided you enter the real date of the change.
What if it changed, but not to what you wrote?
That is a different situation. If the engine visited, read your new title and then showed something else, it chose to rewrite it, perhaps using the visible heading on the page or the text of links pointing to it. The preview cannot predict that, but you can make sure your title describes the page honestly, is not a keyword list, and agrees with the product name shown on the page.
What does not speed it up
- Changing the title again and again over a few days: every change restarts the wait.
- Searching for your page many times: that does not send the engine to visit it.
- Any tool promising instant results: nobody outside the engine controls that, this tool included.
Common questions
How long does an update usually take?
There is no fixed figure. It varies from page to page and site to site, so do not count on a set date.
Does the tool send my new title to the search engine?
No. It works inside your browser only, contacts no engine and does not open your URL.