Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. SERP Title shows up-with-dashes

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    SERP Title shows up-with-dashes

    Technical SEO
    4
    12
    2278
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • BWallacejr
      BWallacejr last edited by

      Occasionally I see the our 'listings' on Google where the Title line shows up with dashes... like

      sony-professional-hard-drive - TapeandMedia.com

      It appears to be the URL shortened and rehashed.  This example was after I searched for "Sony PSZ-HA1T"  without the quotes.  The title for this page is <title></span><span class="html-tag">Sony 1TB Professional Portable External Hard Disk Drive (PSZ-HA1T)</span><span class="html-tag"></title> and the url is http://www.tapeandmedia.com/sony-1tb-professional-portable-hard-drive.asp

      Link to image: http://i.imgur.com/FmvAn6c.jpg

      Other searches (like "Sony 1tb PSZ-HA1T") yield normal looking SERP Titles

      Does anyone know why this happens and what I can do to avoid this?

      FmvAn6c.jpg

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • BradyDCallahan
        BradyDCallahan @BWallacejr last edited by

        Ha, no worries. Somehow it happens all the time! Good luck in solving your SERP title issue!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • BWallacejr
          BWallacejr @BradyDCallahan last edited by

          Ooops!  I'm very sorry about that Brady.

          BradyDCallahan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • BradyDCallahan
            BradyDCallahan @BWallacejr last edited by

            Barry?

            BWallacejr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Giovatto
              Giovatto @BWallacejr last edited by

              Looking at this again, It could also be due to the fact that part of the keyword searched for (PSZ-HA1T) appears at the very end of your title tag and would likely not show up in SERPs (due to your title tag being too long).

              Try reworking it so this keyword would appear in the first ~512 pixels.

              You can use this Moz tool to see a preview. http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • BWallacejr
                BWallacejr @Giovatto last edited by

                Hi Giovatto - Thank you very much for the help.

                Giovatto 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • BWallacejr
                  BWallacejr @BradyDCallahan last edited by

                  Hi Barry - Thank you very much for the help.

                  BradyDCallahan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • metafser
                    metafser @BWallacejr last edited by

                    Got it now ! Many times i saw that kind discussion. Most of the optimizers said, Google re-writed it  for showing result on user. I think, Your keyword and your topics is vey close but your title tag is not good enough for that keyword. Thats why google re-write your title. Without it i have no experience with that kind of problem . I am also thinking that, is it conflicting with shema ? May be Its not good thinking. 😞 I am helpless 😞

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Giovatto
                      Giovatto last edited by

                      The most likely explanation of why your page's title was changed is because it doesn't mention your company/website at all. Google may have thought that the title was misleading and may cause searchers to think they are visiting a website that is official endorsed by Sony. Try adding some branding to the end of your title tags like Google did for you in the example. Something like "- Tape and Media" or " - TapeandMedia.com" to avoid that kind of confusion.

                      BWallacejr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • BWallacejr
                        BWallacejr @metafser last edited by

                        Hi tafser,

                        Thanks for the response.  I tried the search on other computers and saw the same result. The title varies by what you search for.  If you don't mind, please try searching for:

                        Sony PSZ-HA1T

                        and let me know what you see.

                        metafser 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • metafser
                          metafser last edited by

                          I don`t see anything like your screenshot. Here is my screenshot, Check it out: http://prntscr.com/6iqfyx 
                          I think, its your cash problem. Clear your browser cash. 🙂

                          BWallacejr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • BradyDCallahan
                            BradyDCallahan last edited by

                            In my experiences, any time there's a dash in the SERP title, it means Google re-wrote it to some extent. Whether they've shortened it, changed it to something completely unique, it always re-writes with a dash and not a colon, or some other separator.

                            What Google is essentially saying is, "we think this title better describes your page." The first obvious places to look are length and keyword placement/usage: if the title is too long, shorten it. If the main keywords in your title aren't prominently displayed on the page (H1, H2s, body copy, other internal pages using that anchor text, etc.) then I'd try and make those types of changes.

                            Don't go overboard with keyword stuffing or anything like that, of course. It's usually not too hard to get these changed back, just do a little digging, keyword research, and make some of the changes I've recommended. I bet you'll see the title change to what you've suggested after optimizing and another crawl or two.

                            BWallacejr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                            • 1 / 1
                            • First post
                              Last post

                            Got a burning SEO question?

                            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                            Start my free trial


                            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.

                            • See all categories

                            Related Questions

                            • SpartMoz

                              Google Showing wrong image in the SERPS

                              Hi Guys, In organic SERPS Google pulling incorrect product image, instead of product image its showing image from relevant products, Checked the structured data, og:image everything is set to the product image, not sure why google showing images from relevant product sidebar, any help, please?

                              Technical SEO | | SpartMoz
                              0
                            • summithomes

                              Google serp pagination issue

                              We are a local real estate company and have landing pages for different communities and cities around our area that display the most recent listings. For example: www.mysite.com/wa/tumwater is our landing page for the city of Tumwater homes for sale. Google has indexed most of our landing pages, but for whatever reason they are displaying either page 2, 3, 4 etc... instead of page 1.  Our Roy, WA landing page is another example. www.mysite.com/wa/roy has recently been showing up on page 1 of Google for "Roy WA homes for sale", but now we are much further down and www.mysite.com/wa/roy?start=80 (page 5) is the only page in the serps. (coincidentally we no longer have 5 pages worth of listings for this city, so this link now redirects to www.mysite.com/wa/roy.) We haven't made any major recent changes to the site. Any help would be much appreciated! *You can see what my site is in the attached image... I just don't want this post to show up when someone google's the actual name of the business 🙂 nTTrSMx.jpg C4mhfgh.jpg

                              Technical SEO | | summithomes
                              0
                            • smmour

                              SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages

                              Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!

                              Technical SEO | | smmour
                              2
                            • promodirect

                              How to show number of products in your Google SERP?

                              I have used to rich snippet to my website & everything is working fine except showing the total number of products listed in the particular category. Check out the screenshot below: aH7XM

                              Technical SEO | | promodirect
                              0
                            • RosemaryB

                              Old URLs Appearing in SERPs

                              Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server.  We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting.  When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress).  This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.

                              Technical SEO | | RosemaryB
                              3
                            • TruvoDirectories

                              Mobile SERPS: how to optimize for call button

                              Hi, I have 2 questions about the "call" button on mobile google serps when doing a business name search: -since when is this button available in SERPS -is there anything specific you can do to actually have google display that call button (schema.org, ...) Kind regards Pieter

                              Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
                              0
                            • mosaicpro

                              Multiple title and description change is considered spam?

                              I'm changing title and description several times throught 1-2 months...  will Google penalize me? I'm worried that testing several title and description ideas would affect the site rankings on google. Anyone had a problem with that... or can i continue testing as many titles and descriptions as i want?

                              Technical SEO | | mosaicpro
                              0
                            • Audiohype

                              The effect of same IP addresses on SERPs

                              Hi All, Just wondering if anyone could shed some light on the following. If I was ranking number 1 for a term, what would the effects be of creating another site, hosted on the same server / IP, same whois info, same URL but a different TLD, and trying to get this to rank for the term also. Does G restrict search results to one IP per page or is this perfectly possible? (The term is fairly uncompetitive) Thanks, Ben

                              Technical SEO | | Audiohype
                              0

                            Get started with Moz Pro!

                            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                            Start my free trial
                            Products
                            • Moz Pro
                            • Moz Local
                            • Moz API
                            • Moz Data
                            • STAT
                            • Product Updates
                            Moz Solutions
                            • SMB Solutions
                            • Agency Solutions
                            • Enterprise Solutions
                            • Digital Marketers
                            Free SEO Tools
                            • Domain Authority Checker
                            • Link Explorer
                            • Keyword Explorer
                            • Competitive Research
                            • Brand Authority Checker
                            • Local Citation Checker
                            • MozBar Extension
                            • MozCast
                            Resources
                            • Blog
                            • SEO Learning Center
                            • Help Hub
                            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                            • How-to Guides
                            • Moz Academy
                            • API Docs
                            About Moz
                            • About
                            • Team
                            • Careers
                            • Contact
                            Why Moz
                            • Case Studies
                            • Testimonials
                            Get Involved
                            • Become an Affiliate
                            • MozCon
                            • Webinars
                            • Practical Marketer Series
                            • MozPod
                            Connect with us

                            Contact the Help team

                            Join our newsletter
                            Moz logo
                            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                            • Accessibility
                            • Terms of Use
                            • Privacy

                            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.