Switched to HTTPS, now Google ALWAYS changes Page Title & Meta in SERPs
-
Wordpress website using Yoast.
Website switched over from HTTP to HTTPS successfully about 6 months ago. Noticed after the fact that Google almost never displays the Page Title or Meta Description I've created in Yoast. Yoast is the only SEO plug-in enabled. Yoast is set to Force Rewrite the Page TItles.
The Page titles & Meta Descriptions are always within the character limit. They also contain either an exact or partial match the queries in which Google shows a different Page Title & Meta Description.
For some Queries, Google will display the URL as the Page Title for certain queries. Concrete example, search for: public administration jobs
Screenshot of results attached.
First time working with HTTPS. The redirects appear to be have done correctly. I'm not sure what the issue is.
-
Sure, best example would be https://onlinempa.unc.edu/student-life/careers-in-public-administration/
Sample queries:
- public administration jobs
- mpa jobs
- careers in public administration
-
Hi, its time to check your titles and descriptions. With all respect for Yoast plugin, I would still recommend to write the page titles and descriptions manually at least for the most important pages on your website. Google changing the titles and descriptions is not new and all that we can do is try and test different titles and descriptions.
Here you go for more on this..
1. https://yoast.com/google-page-title/
2. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2342232/Why-Google-Changes-Your-Titles-in-Search-Results
and here..
4. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/K6D14caef7U
Hope they help.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Could you possibly share a link so we could check it out? I cannot think of anything off the top of my head that would cause it.
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
-
2 Title elements on a single page
Hi there. I am looking at a site that currently has 2 <title>elements present on every page through out the site. They have a main Title with appropriate optimization. Then they have another <title> that appears to be empty. It looks like this; <span class="html-tag"><title></span><span class="html-tag"></title> I know having 2 <title>elements is not ideal. But if the second one is empty, can it still have a negative affect? </p> <p>Thanks</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ciceron_main0 -
Implementing AMP pages on WordPress blog
Hey Moz Users, Has anyone tried using the WordPress plugin for AMP pages on their blog yet? Here's the link to it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/. The implementation seems pretty straightforward but since there will be an AMP and a mobile friendly version of the posts on my blog I'm worried it will create a lot of duplicate content issues. I've seen a lot of articles pointing to a rel canonical tag that can be used to fix this situation. Not sure if I'm going to have an AMP version of all the posts on my blog, so this seems like it would be a pain to place the tag manually on specific pages with the AMP version only. Has anyone tried this plugin and what have you done to fix this duplicate content issue? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Page title and slug as complements to one another?
When creating a page, is it ever worthwhile to ensure that there's minimal duplication in the keywords in the page title vs. the slug? Or is it more like the title is more like a sentence description of the page and the slug is a scannable set of keywords that describes the page, and duplication doesn't really matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Google Hummingbird Update - Any Changes ?
Google has update with the new alogrithm and did you see any effects and as they are not revelaing the techinicaly how they work ? What's your opinion ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esaky0 -
Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
Hi, Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour. It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place? I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Google is displaying my pages path instead of URLS (Pages name)
Does anyone knows why Google is displaying my pages path instead of the URL in the search results, i discoverd that while am searching using a keyword of mine then i copied the link http://www.smarttouch.me/services-saudi/web-services/web-design and found all related results are the same, could anyone one tell me why is that and is it really differs? or the URL display is more important than the Path display for SEO!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ali8810 -
Magento Hidden Products & Google Not Found Errors
We recently moved our website over to the Magento eCommerce platform. Magento has functionality to make certain items not visible individually so you can, for example, take 6 products and turn it into 1 product where a customer can choose their options. You then hide all the individual products, leaving only that one product visible on the site and reducing duplicate content issues. We did this. It works great and the individual products don't show up in our site map, which is what we'd like. However, Google Webmaster Tools has all of these individual product URLs in its Not Found Crawl Errors. ! For example: White t-shirt URL: /white-t-shirt Red t-shirt URL: /red-t-shirt Blue t-shirt URL: /blue-t-shirt All of those are not visible on the site and the URLs do not appear in our site map. But they are all showing up in Google Webmaster Tools. Configurable t-shirt URL: /t-shirt This product is the only one visible on the site, does appear on the site map, and shows up in Google Webmaster Tools as a valid URL. ! Do you know how it found the individual products if it isn't in the site map and they aren't visible on the website? And how important do you think it is that we fix all of these hundreds of Not Found errors to point to the single visible product on the site? I would think it is fairly important, but don't want to spend a week of man power on it if the returns would be minimal. Thanks so much for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0