Last week, I upset some people by the words I used in my headline of my story which read Google: Title Tags Are Not A Critical Ranking Signal. Truth is, John Mueller of Google said it and he is sticking with it. The word “critical” is the issue here. Critical in his mind is you cannot rank without it, but you can rank without title tags in Google.

In any event, John explained more in a Google Hangout yesterday at the 16:20 mark into the video. Here is what he said:

Here is the video embed:

So yes, titles are used by Google as a ranking signal. They are 100% important. But you can rank without using them.

Forum discussion at Google+.