I am seeing numerous complaints this morning that Google is showing header tags, H1s and H2s, instead of the meta title tags, for its search result snippets. I am seeing some public complaints on Twitter, but also in some of the private forums and emails.

So this seems to be more widespread of a change. I tried to quickly replicate it, but I didn’t come up with any examples.

Yes, I know Google might not show the title tag for the clickable link of the Google search result snippet, but often Google does. And based on the early chatter, there may have been a shift in how Google is handling it. Maybe it is a bug or a test, I am not sure.

Here are some of the public mentions of this:

Robert Owen from Timberwise shared a few examples with me, here is one:

If you look at the page, Google is pulling the H1, not the title tag.

Do you see any of this?

Forum discussion at Twitter.