Site titles / descriptions change - Google Algo Change ?
-
Hello,
During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this.can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here?
sites:
http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
http://www.gossipbingo.com
http://www.moonbingo.comin the attached examples:
for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions.results for these pages:
moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php -
We saw a lot of this across multiple client websites. Once we saw it on 2, we went and checked all of the others we are optimizing and noticed almost 50% of them changed. Mainly, their Home page Title and Description were modified for various searches related to the client's brand/business name.
Taking note of what Google had changed everything to and cross referencing to the on page content, we edited their Home page Title, Description and also portions of their body content or widget section content. We then resubmitted the sites to Google through Webmasters Tool and have seen most convert to what we want and Google is now displaying.
Try those tactics. Hope this was helpful based on our experiences. - Patrick
-
Yes, Google does change the title tag in it's Google search results, according to Google's Webmaster Tools Q&A site:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
Google says that it uses rich snippets of information from your site, as well as a DMOZ, too, for this information.
According to a Yoast article in March of 2013, they write, "So… Basically, Google says: we know better, you can try and write a title we like, but we reserve to do whatever to make people click on your result." ( Why Google won’t display the right page title: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/__)
Another article by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land in April 2013, "When Google Gets It Wrong By Changing the Titles of Web Pages" (http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819) says, "Google doesn’t always use the HTML title tag of a web page, choosing instead to make its own title for a page, if it thinks it can do a better job. Here’s an example of it getting this completely wrong."
So, it appears that Google has decided it's page titles are better than yours…
Options:
-
Disallow Google to use DMOZ information in rich snippet information
-
Try changing your title tags again, or the content of the pages.
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
-
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
-
Many meta descriptions ignored by Google
Hi all, We have recently added the meta descriptions for more than 50 pages of our website. It's been more than a week and all the pages have been indexed. But still I can see most of the pages in Google results didn't show up with recently added meta description, but the content from page like how it used to be. I wonder what's wrong with this scenario. Please guide of someone aware of this. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How seasonal would you expect organic on a b2b site to be?
I have a client who has a b2b site catering to a white collar information market. Looking back in G/A, it appears that they've never had a good organic search Summer, but have made plenty of YOY gains.This Summer is a little better than past Summers. Personally, I have read about people who take Summer vacations. Mostly in France. This is a U.S. site and U.S. traffic catering to business executives. I can see it in the parking lot of the downtown office building I work in... fewer cars after Memorial Day and more cars after Labor Day. How seasonal would you expect that kind of organic search traffic to be, say from April vs July? Would prefer answers from direct B2B experience, rather than guesses. But, if a guess is all you have, I will gladly accept that! Thanks... Darcy
Algorithm Updates | | 945010 -
Did Google update the length of characters allowed in Meta Description?
Hey all, I do SEO. I'm currently working with another SEO firm on a project. The lady mentioned to me that Google recently updated (couple months ago) and changed their font causing them to lower the meta description to 55 characters. Is this true? I have not heard of this. Could she be confusing the meta description with the title tag? I didn't know Google could have even update the Title tag too.
Algorithm Updates | | ColeLusby0 -
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 -
Should you include Website Title in all page title tags?
We recently spent analyzing some of the best SEO software companies on the U.S. market fishing for the best practices in SEO and I saw one thing in common : They all had website titles in all the page title tags separated by " | " Is that the best practice for SEO or is it just for Branding? Interestingly enough, the website titles were completely unrelated to the pages' content or keywords. (Here's my personal opinion on what it looked like: "riding on a bicycle" | Ferrari ) But when I looked up the keywords ... ranked #1 or #2 spots, in some serious competition. (So in the example above, "bicycle" would be in the top spot)
Algorithm Updates | | HMCOE0 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0 -
Was I Kicked Off Google Page One by Panda/Farmer?
Took over this site in March. Got a Panicked call from client Mid-March that all of a sudden keywords that put the site on Page One weren't working. There are still 9 that work, but apparently there were more. A large percentage of the backlinks are from Article Directories and Link Farms. Is this my problem? Also, a large percentage of the 149 pages suffer from keyword stuffing and were obviously written for Search Engines and not people. How much of a difference does that make?
Algorithm Updates | | reeljerc0