Search snippet ignors title tag :-(
-
Good Morning from 1 degrees C light drizzle Wetherby UK
Ok here is todays puzzle. When I Google "Great Inns" ( http://www.greatinns.co.uk ) I get a search snippet which looks like this: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/great-inns-title-glitch.jpg
As the screen grab illustrates the Title tag is missing and simply says untitled. So my questions is pleased why is google rendering this when in the source code there is a tag eg: <title>Great Inns of Britain - Home – Independent, Historic Inns, Quality Service Any insights welcome :-)</p></title>
-
Thank you for all your replies.. The code is getting cleaned up as I type
-
Actually, this happened to me just today, on google.com itself:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/14/picture62u.png/
Got this when searching 'keywordtoolexternal' (because for some reason I don't bookmark stuff like this). Something strange is up, have never seen this sort of thing before.
EDIT: JohnMu from Google has stated that these issues are more than likely related to robots.txt:
http://blog.northcutt.com/2012/02/untitled-page-title-in-google/
-
For what it's worth, there's another thread about someone having "untitled" show up in the Google SERPs at http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-is-showing-website-as-untitled.
-
And, 'mornin from Houston where we don't use no C's with our weather reportin' It's 61 (that's with an F).
Nightwing, you may also want to take a look at your overall on page SEO for the site. Every page has the same title tag, meta description and H1. At least the ones I looked at. A good place for you to start is with the Beginner's guide to SEO here on SEOmoz.
Chapter 4 talks about how to set up a page in terms of these key elements.
The Q&A will help you along as you have questions. Good luck.
-
Google Webmaster Tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
An integral tool for any SEO campaign.
-
HI Alan, I'm brand new to SEO moz, may i ask whats GWMT please?
-
Surely not. Google is smart enough to ignore white spaces?
-
Morning from Leeds!
I agree with Paul, it looks as though it might be because <title>is over 3 lines</p> <p> </p> <pre id="line18"><span class="attribute-name"> </span><span class="attribute-value">esheet" </span><span class="error"><span class="attribute-name">/</span></span>><<span class="start-tag">title</span>> Great Inns of Britain - Home – Independent, Historic Inns, Quality Service </<span class="end-tag">title</span>></<span class="end-tag">head</span>></pre></title>
-
Hi from 1 degree C, overcast (but no drizzle yet) Blackpool,
As Alan says check you GWMT and move your title tag up in the head.
There may be something deeper going on though, I tried searching text from your deeper pages to see if those pages had titles in G serps. But alas I was unable to find the pages in the SERPs after copying and pasting the text. (Some only showed 4 results and yours was not amongst them).
I also Googled a number of your URLs and again I got stumped.
GWMT pronto and see whats occurring!
-
Not far here (Halifax).
Very strange as to me the code seems ok. It not however on a different line for the title tags, not sure this would help having the <title>start on a new line?</p></title>
-
Goog afternoon from 38C hot and humid Perth Western Australia
google often replaces your title if it is keywords stuffed, yours is a bit stuffed,
but to be sure, go to GWMT and crawl as googlebot and see what it sees. see if your title is showing.
Your title is at the bottem of the head section, it could be that something above is stoping it making it to your title.
Try moving it up higher
Also i would place my encodeing first after the head 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
-
Should we set up redirects for all deleted TAGS?
We recently found our site had 65,000 tags (yes 65K). In an effort to consolidate these we've started deleting them. MOZ is now reporting a heap of 404 errors for tag pages. These tag pages should not have links to them so not sure how come they're being crawled. Any suggestions from experience in this area would be useful.
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading (used for emphasis)?
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading? My clients are using heading tags for text they want to emphasize and make stand out. Does this affect search rankings for SEO?
Technical SEO | | jthompson05130 -
Reciprocal links and nofollow tag
What happens if I link to a site using the nofollow tag and they are linking back to me with a dofollow link? Will it give me as much power and link juice as if it was a one way link (to me) or will Google discount the link because it's reciprocal?
Technical SEO | | Livet0 -
Nesting tag within tables?
I am working with a site that is using tables to display data. My question is should I nest header tags within the table header , or tags. For example, the beginning of a new row could have a "row header" that is an tag, or the caption is an .
Technical SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
Increase Search Ranking for CEO
Hi guys My company CEO is concerned that when her name is googled pictures of a glamour model appear in the image results area. The glamour model shares a second name with our CEO and this is why the model's images are appearing. I have been asked to rectify this situation. My CEO has a linked in page and twitter account which are underused but no personal page on our company website. I was thinking of buying the url for the CEO's name and optimizing a small site for her name with bio etc and links to twitter, lined in etc. Would this be the best strategy? Thanks Gavin
Technical SEO | | gavinr0 -
How should I shorten my titles?
I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?
Technical SEO | | dbuckles0 -
Joomla problem, title tag too long
Another problem SEOMOZ reported is that my title tags are too long. However, when I type in the title and the description for a particular page on Joomla, the description later appears not only as the meta description, but as part of the page title as well, thus the title appears to be too long. I have no idea how to seperate those two. Anyone?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
How do you add a description to the Meta Description area to Tag Pages in Wordpress? This way I do not get the errors: "Missing Meta Description Tag" from SEOMoz Bot? Thanks!
I tried to add descriptions to my tags in Wordpress (well actually one to test), but I still keep getting the "Missing Meta Description Tag" error. Any suggestions on how to fix this in Wordpress? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jhblogger0