Google Algorithm change? - Brand name now overwriting title tag?
-
Anyone else noticing this happening? In Google search results, many of my sites are now showing up in the following fashion...
"Site name: page title"
I read a few articles in the past few days that state that Google may be playing with the algo but have not read anything from Google directly.
I should add that I first noticed this on Feb. 21 and have seen it rolling out more and more since. I have only noticed it on a few competitor websites thus far.
Edit:Some links talking about the subject
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html
http://semandseo.blogspot.ca/2013/03/google-brand-title-in-search.html
http://www.designbigger.com/blog/seo/google-rewrites-page-titles-to-push-brand-over-keywords/
-
I am seeing this too, Google flips the order of our brand name and our USP in our homepage title.
"USP - Brand Name"
now becomes
"Brand Name: USP"
-
Why not just put up the link you are talking about so we can see for ourselves?
-
Thanks for the response Francsisco.
I do not think this it the case but will test regardless. I am noticing some competitors who are not stuffing and they are also being hit by this. At the same time, I am seeing a few competitors who are much more likely to be stuffing and they are not being affected.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html
Rand, where art thou? Help!
-
That used to happen to me. I changed my title tags to see if Google would display them differently on the next crawl. It didn't work. THen I rewrote them again using completely different keywords and then Google displayed it the way I had written it.
My suspicion as to why this happened to me was I used the words car & auto in the title. I also used rates & cost. Maybe Google thought I was over optimizing my titles. Try it out and see if something changes on your title tags.
-
Dana
I read over at searchengineland that Google is testing something. I will try to find the article shortly. Also, it has been noticed by many that this is only affecting websites homepages.
Mat
Google is overriding the title to display as I mentioned above, regardless of how you have it formatted.
And yes, Mathew is the most awesome way to spell our name
-
Hi Mat,
As a matter of habit, we tend to construct our title tags with the configuration you mentioned: Title | Company Name
I just checked our listings as well as many competitors and they are all showing the title tags as normal, and as we've configured them. I'm not seeing anything different right now.
It could be that Google is testing this and may be serving different results from different data centers or to users in certain locations.
Thanks for the heads up though. I'll keep and eye out for anything different and post back here if I see something different.
Dana
-
Not currently seeing it from here. I'll check it from some proxies tomorrow.
-
I am seeing the same thing happening. Check out the seomoz title in the search results. The company name and title tag are getting flipped.
-
Nice to see another Mathew spelling their name the correct way
Are you talking about people structuring their title tags in that way, or Google over-riding the title tag & showing the title in that format in the snippet?
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
-
A Google Update Happened?
I'm curious to know what us MOZ folks have to say about an update on Google. Article here: http://searchengineland.com/big-google-search-update-happening-chatter-thinks-258142 Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | Chenzo0 -
Google not crawling click to expand content - suggestions?
It seems like Google confirmed this week in a G+ hangout that content in click to expand content e.g. 'read more' dropdown and tabbed content scenarios will be discounted. The suggestion was if you have content it needs to be visible on page load. Here's more on it https://www.seroundtable.com/google-index-click-to-expand-19449.html and the actual hangout, circa 11 mins in https://plus.google.com/events/cjcubhctfdmckph433d00cro9as. From a UX and usability point of view having a lot of content that was otherwise tabbed or in click to expand divs can be terrible, especially on mobile. Does anyone have workable solutions or can think of examples of really great landing pages (i'm mostly thinking ecommerce) that also has a lot of visible content? Thanks Andy
Algorithm Updates | | AndyMacLean0 -
Ranking dropped with no page changes
My rank for a keyword went from ranking #1 to #22. The page grade for this keyword is A, there was no site structure changes. The only thing I can see is that tumblr and reddit and other sources are now listed for this keyword and it's difficulty went from the mid-low teens to 28%. However, even given that, I do not a see a reason for this keyword alone to fall so far. It was giving us a ton of traffic, in fact, most of our organic search results came from this term for nearly two months. And 2 weeks ago for no reason, we were pushed to page 3. Has anyone else had similar experiences how do you counter it, and what can we do?
Algorithm Updates | | mozmemberanon0 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
Did The Last Google Algorithm Update, Hit sites with poor anchor text?
My content is quite strong within my niche, so I ranked well, but last month my rankings plummeted. On closer examination and scrutiny I discovered my anchor text needed updating. Has anyone else seen this happening in the last four weeks?
Algorithm Updates | | simonberenyi0 -
Are the tags from schema.org beneficial for SEO?
I just came across schema.org, which has a massive list of attribute tags that can be added to HTML code, presumable with the benefit of giving search engines clear signals about your content -- and by extension, presumably boosting the ranking of good-quality content sites. Many of the tags point back to schema.org for definitions of content types. Since it's the first time I've seen this, I thought I'd ask the question: Do the tags listed at schema.org carry any weight with Google, or is this a self-promotional effort by schema.org to become an arbiter of SEO and content encoding? Thanks folks.
Algorithm Updates | | RobM4160 -
Data on Google Vs Bing, et al and changes to sites.
I am curious to know if anyone has any data that correlates site/page changes like content or Title Tag, H1, etc. and subsequent movement in rankings on Google and Bing and Yahoo? The equation is for example: ABCSite.com/home-page/ makes a change to the H1 and H2 and one paragraph of content is changed. Over next 6 to 12 weeks changes in page rank for the 3 engines is tracked to see where it started and where it "stopped." Obviously, there are more factors than individual algorithms in play here. An example of that would be that a significant number of sites will be indexed in Google by a dev and not in the others. We see this regularly. So, at least from a timing standpoint, different sites are entering/leaving the fray at different rates. We are going to begin to track this but I would love to see any data already around or speak with anyone involved in such a study about what they found. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | RobertFisher0 -
Removing secure subdomain from google index
we've noticed over the last few months that Google is not honoring our main website's robots.txt file. We have added rules to disallow secure pages such as: Disallow: /login.cgis Disallow: /logout.cgis Disallow: /password.cgis Disallow: /customer/* We have noticed that google is crawling these secure pages and then duplicating our complete ecommerce website across our secure subdomain in the google index (duplicate content) https://secure.domain.com/etc. Our webmaster recently implemented a specific robots.txt file for the secure subdomain disallow all however, these duplicated secure pages remain in the index. User-agent: *
Algorithm Updates | | marketing_zoovy.com
Disallow: / My question is should i request Google to remove these secure urls through Google Webmaster Tools? If so, is there any potential risk to my main ecommerce website? We have 8,700 pages currently indexed into google and would not want to risk any ill effects to our website. How would I submit this request in the URL Removal tools specifically? would inputting https://secure.domain.com/ cover all of the urls? We do not want any secure pages being indexed to the index and all secure pages are served on the secure.domain example. Please private message me for specific details if you'd like to see an example. Thank you,0