Google Doesn't Display A Right Page Title
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For some reason Google Displays a wrong page title of some of my pages.
E.g. page http://www.imoney.my/home-loan
The title in the search reach results says "Home Loan - iMoney", but the one I've set up is <title></span><span class="webkit-html-tag">Housing Loan: Compare Mortgages of All Malaysian Banks @iMoney.my</span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title>
Even when I preview it on the preview tool, it shows the full title, but when I google - again the short one.
Does anyone know what the reason for that is?
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Hi Bruno,
Google does reserve the right to edit how page titles are displayed in search results and they are doing this more and more. In theory, they do this to actually improve user experience but because this is algorithmic, they can sometimes get it wrong or it may not look exactly how you want.
Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do to stop Google from changing the title tags. I think they are less likely to change them if you have one that is well-written and relevant, but in reality, you're not going to make it relevant for every single keyword search that your site displays for.
Here is a relevant piece of info from these Google guidelines:
"If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."
Here are some good resources showing other examples of changing titles as they wish:
http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles
http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819
I hope that helps!
Paddy
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When I go to imoney.my/home-loan, it is redirected to http://www.imoney.my/v2/home-loan6, so that could be part of the issue.
Also, don't know if it is the same in Drupal, but in Joomla, when you want to optimize the title tags, its done through the menu page, not directly on the article page. It looks like it's displaying that because that is the default page title, so I don't think you have found either the correct page or the correct place to optimize the title for that page.
Good Luck
Jeff
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Hi Bruno,
Based on my analysis, below I have listed few major reasons for why Google generating its own title tag for your pages in SERPs.
- Missing Title Tag
- Title Tag is Lengthy
- Title Tag is Too Short
Source: http://pparthipan.blogspot.in/2011/09/is-google-ignoring-title-tag-in-serps.html
Thanks,
Parthipan.P
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