Most SEOs often look at titles tags when browsing web sites, I mean, I do, while the average person does not. So you’ve probably seen numbers in the tab bar representing an unread direct message count or chat request. Well, Shopify sites using chat-bot script was adding a 1 to the titles of pages and that is what Google has been indexing.

Caio Barros from Google posted about it in the Google Webmaster Help forums saying “some Shopify websites are showing a (1) in the titles of search results.”

In short, this chat feature was adding a (1) to the title tags when Googlebot was crawling the pages. Google then indexed and displayed the (1) in the search results. Since then, the chat feature removed the (1) from the title tag and thus when Googlebot recrawls and indexes the pages the (1) should no longer be in the title tag and Google will eventually stop showing (1) in the title name in the search results.

Caio Barros said:

John Mueller added a tip on Twitter saying Title-tip: if you use a widget/script that changes your page titles, those changed titles can be picked up for search too.”

Here is how I see the title of that tweet in my tab bar, although, although Googlebot is not fed that information – thus it has a normal title name in the search results.

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.