Google Not Indexing Description or correct title (very technical)
-
Hey guys,
I am managing the site: http://www.theattractionforums.com/
If you search the keyword "PUA Forums", it will be in the top 10 results, however the title of the forum will be "PUA Forums" rather than using the code in the title tag, and no description will display at all (despite there being one in the code).
Any page other than the home-page that ranks shows the correct title and description.
We're completely baffled! Here are some interesting bits and pieces:
-
It shows up fine on Bing
-
If I go into GWT and Fetch as Google Bot, it shows up as "Unreachable" when I try to pull the home-page.
-
We previously found that it was pulling 'index.htm' before 'index.php' - and this was pulling a blank page. I've fixed this in the .htaccess however to make it redirect, however this hasn't solved the problem.
-
I've disallowed it from pulling the description .etc from the Open Directory with the use of meta tags - didn't change anything.
It's vBulletin and is running vBSEO
Any suggestions at all guys?
I'll be forever in anyones debt who can solve this, it's proving to be near impossible to fix.
Here is the .htaccess file, it may be a part of the issue:
RewriteEngine On
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
Redirect /index.html http://www.theattractionforums.com/index.php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.theattractionforums.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [L,R=301]RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*.(xml|txt)(.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron|vbseo_sitemap/)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(..php(/.)?)?)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^forum/(.*)$ http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
-
Hey guys,
SEOmoz's software done a crawl for me, and we got a crawl error at this page:
http://www.theattractionforums.com/%3Ca%20href=
This translates to:
http://www.theattractionforums.com/<a href=
What do you think is going on? So confused!
-
Hi Guys,
I've fixed up the above, the 'meta name' and the 'title' issues - however this still doesn't seem to explain why Google wouldn't be able t crawl the page.
It also seems strange that Google would choose NO description over one that is provided. While theoretically plausible, I would find it extremely odd.
Thanks guys,
JC
-
I don't know if this is specifically related but I spotted a typo in your homepage's source code while reviewing this. You have this code: <metaname="robots" <span="">content="noodp,noydir" /></metaname="robots">
in your HTML head. There should be a space between meta and name in that tag. I didn't spot anything else that jumped out to me as wrong. I'd fix that tag for sure, and I hope someone else here can help illuminate further.
Best,
-
The reason it is not using your title is you have stuffed it with keywords
PUA Forums | The Attraction Forums | Free Men's Dating Forum | The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed
its 118 characters long, it should be 65 at most, google will not use such a title
somthing like
Free Men's Dating Forum | PUA Forums
would be better, remember its a title not a short story, just give the poeple an idea, dont try to give them a sales picth
google picks a description that matchs the query, it is hard to predict when it will use your description tag.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Google Adding Wrong Location to Title Tag on Multi-Branch Business Homepage
We're a business with 5 separate locations across 5 cities in Upstate NY. While doing some visual ad previews in the adwords interface I noticed that Google is altering my title tag and adding the word "Rochester" to the end of it, cutting short my designated title tag. Rochester is the location of our headquarters so not a big deal for 1/5th of our customers. But to my dismay, the same thing is happening when searching from the geo locations of my other branches. So when searching for my business in Buffalo (we have a physical address in Buffalo), the title tag in the results still says our company name and "Rochester". This of course is likely leading to confusion and actively harming our organic CTR in our branch locations. This is happening in all of the remaining 4 branch locations. I'm at a loss, I tried lengthening the title tag but it still gets cut off. The term Rochester appears (as do the other branch locations) in my meta description for the homepage as well as in the text of the page itself. I haven't gone so far as to remove that yet and hopefully don't have to. Does anyone have any ideas? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Doylejg30 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Urgent problem - multilingual website title tag and meta description problem
Hello, Our client websites was ranking in high position in Google for a handful of keywords. Targeted keywords were in the title tag but for some reasons Google is not showing thouse keywords in title tag anymore. Instead Google shows same keywords in different language. I think there are some multilingual title tag problem. Any ideas how to solve it? Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serp-eesti0 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Changing Hosting Companies - Site Downtime - Google Indexing Concern
We are getting ready to switch to a new hosting company. When we make the switchover, our sites will be offline for a couple of hours and in some cases perhaps as long as 12 hours while DNS is configured -- should we be worried about Google trying to index pages and finding them unavailable? Any fear of Google de-indexing pages. Our guess was that Google would not de-index anything after just a short period of not being able to find pages -- it would have to be over an extended period of time before GOOGLE or BING would de-index pages -- CORRECT? Just want to gut check this before pulling the trigger on switch over to new hosting company. We appreciate input on this and/or any other thoughts regarding the switch over to new hosting company that we may not have thought of. Thanks, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720 -
Why do i not receive google traffic?
over the 4-5 months i have published over 3000 unique articles which i have payed well over 10 000usd for, but i still only receive about 20 google visitors a day for that content. i uploaded the 3000 articles after i 301 redirected the old site to a a new domain (old site had 1000 articles, and at least 300visits from google a day), and all the old conetnt receives the traffic fine (301 redirect is working 100percent now and pr went from 0 to 3pr) articles are also good ranging from 400-800 words. 90 percent of them are indexed by google, most of them have been bookmarked to digg reddit etc website domain is over 10 years old - alltopics.com why google doesnt send me the traffic i deserve?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rxesiv0