301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
-
Hi,
This is a new one to me ?!
I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages.
Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on?
The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s?
I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet)
Any help would be appreciated.
Kind Regards
Tony
-
Yes my friend. It happens with Google as they are trying hard and working towards their ultimate goal that is as follows:
"We would like to give the user what he wants and not what he types in the search bar"
So all that one can do is to just stick to the best practices, put in diligent and sincere efforts to make our websites provide a good if not the best user experience. I would also like to suggest you that if you can make the title, description and the content go hand-in-hand tightly, then you will not have to worry about Google picking up a title on its own. Yet, no one can guarantee even if you do so will make Google will pick-up the meta information that you mentioned.
-
Hi Devanur,
This was indeed the problem. Trying different keywords resulted in different title texts.
Nothing to do with the 301s after all.
Thanks for your help.
Tony
-
Don't worry my friend. Its been just 3 days. Wait for sometime and check for the issue. You should be doing good. There is one more thing in here. Google does not always show the same title in the SERPs that you specified on your website. It can pick anything that it feels relevant for the page. The possible places to pick would be, content of the page, your site's DMOZ listing and also the title can differ depending on the search term.
For more about this issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/webmasters/uuLNmyB0AlY
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Devanur,
I did the redirects Friday, so it seems odd that it has made a difference so soon. On looking at it further I found that all pages that had a redirect added last Friday have the wrong title in googles serp whilst the pages that didn't get redirected to remain unchanged??
I am confident all the page titles were correct before I did the redirect.
The titles that have been attributed to my current pages are from old pages that were removed in October??
I'm wondering if google got mixed up when crawling my site.
-
Hi Tony,
How long has it been since you did a 301. Normally, it would take 3 to 5 weeks for the new changes to reflect in the SERPS.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Htaccess or url rewrite module for Magento 301 redirects?
I need to do about 6000 redirects for a Magento site. The pages no longer exist. I have tried the URL rewrite module but it isn't working for me and I don't want to do 6000 redirects in the htaccess files. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Google Not Pulling The Right Title Tag & Meta Description
Hi guys. We've found Google is pulling the wrong information for our title tag and meta description. Instead of pulling the actual title tag, Google is pulling the menu name you click on to get to the page: "Bike Barcelona" instead of "Barcelona Bike Tours | ...." Also, we've found that, instead of pulling the meta description we wrote, Google is using text from the pages copy. Any tips?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BarcelonaExperience0 -
Google Cache Is Blank for Text-only
Hi, I'm doing some SEO for www.suprafootwear.com, and for some reason when I go to text-only in google cache, nothing shows up. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:suprafootwear.com&es_sm=91&strip=1 That seems to be the case for all of the different pages on the site, but the content is still appearing on the serp. I have never seen this before, and I'm not sure what's happening. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigwavew0 -
Have Title Tags Changed After Hummingbird?
Now that Hummingbird is really looking at longer-tail searches and almost a Q&A style search, should the way we do our title tags change? Moz still recommends: Optimal Format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword But is this really right anymore after Hummingbird? Should we be more of a Q&A type title tag, while still using our Primary Keyword? For example: If I am targeting Red Nike Shoes, should my title tag be: Red Nike Shoes, Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or now: We carry the latest Red Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or Find Red Nike Shoes on sale at shoes.com What are your thoughts?0 -
What time to expect until onpage change is reflected in google ranking?
Most pages on our site are crawled by google about once per week. We plan to implement a new navigation structure with much more interlinks among our pages. I would like to test it first just for a few pages to measure impact. How long may it take approximately until an onpage change related to link structure is reflected in google rankings? Any experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
Dropped 50 places for Page Title Change
Hey Guys, I've got a keyword set that is really annoying me. You see on the 19th July I changed my page title for the home page to what I thought would be something more competitive and instead of climbing from rank 9/10 I dropped out of the top 50. So I waited 2 weeks to see if it changed and it just stayed out of the top 50. After two weeks I changed it back again and I've been out of the top 50 ever since. I havnt made any real significant changes to the site as I've held off waiting for the keyword ranking to return but I dont think it will. I was trying to improve the keyword phrase "bahamas all inclusive" for the website www.smallhope.com. I'd managed to get on to page 1 rank 9/10 depending. I changed the title; from "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive" to "Bahamas All Inclusive Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive" This is really bad for us and I'm not sure what to do. I had a whole plan in place starting with the Title and moving on to the H1 tags, but now I'm not so sure. I've put everything on hold. If this was you what would you do to get back to page 1? Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0