Issues with Sitelinks
-
Hey Everyone,
I found a couple threads where this was asked, but unfortunately I haven't seen any responses that explain it yet.
My issue is with the sitelinks Google is choosing for a section of my website; they're using wrong/lowercase anchor text for a couple of the page titles that isn't anywhere on the page or in the backend that I can find (see screenshot).
Any thoughts/reasons as to why they'd be using the lowercase text there?
Thanks in advance!
- David
-
Thanks for the answers! I actually found out it had to do with a subheadline that was in all caps in the articles that was coming through. SEO, the neverending puzzle...
-
I see a similar thing happening and in it looks like Google doesn't pick the title for the Sitelink, but instead Google picks my URL.
So for example where my <title>on a page can be "Contact us by sending us an email or just call us", it is correctly displayed in a non-site link situation in Google, but in a site link situation the title suddenly is displayed as "Contact", because my URL is example.com<strong>/contac</strong>t</p> <p>The same happens for the site link title "About [company name]" where the URL is example.com<strong>/about-[company-name]</strong>.</p> <p>BTW, in your case it looks like Google is picking the H1 tag in a way.</p> <p>Hope this helps.</p> <p>André</p></title>
-
Unfortunately, you're in a tough spot here. Google no longer gives you the ability to have demote specific sitelinks. When it comes to page titles, Google often rewrites them as they see fit. You cannot prevent them from ignoring or editing a specific page title.
I have seen the following two things have a major impact on Google's decision to alter existing title tags.
- Title Tag Length: If your title tag is too long, Google often chooses to truncate it as they see fit or choose body content related to the query.
- Anchor Text: If you can find any internal or external anchor text links that point at those pages with that punctuation style, try to get them updated to the punctuation you want.
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
-
How to fix Category Duplicate Titles Issue?
How to fix Category Duplicate titles and descriptions issues? Most common problem in Wordpress. Example - http://www.abc.com.au/news
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/3
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/4
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/5
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/10
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/6
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/7
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/9
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/80 -
Sitelinks are wrong
When I search my website on Google, the sitelinks that I have appear to be wrong. How can I fix this? I have all of my pages optimized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | litesourceinc0 -
Issue with Site Map - how critical would you rank this in terms of needing a fix?
A problem has been introduced onto our sitemap whereby previously excluded URLs are no longer being correctly excluded. These are returning a HTTP 400 Bad Request server response, although do correctly redirect to users. We have around 2300 pages of content, and around 600-800 of these previously excluded URLs, An example would be http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana/suggested-holidays/botswana-classic-camping-safari/Dates and prices.aspx (the page does correctly redirect to users). The site is currently being rebuilt and only has a life span of a few months. The cost our current developers have given us for resolving this is quite high with this in mind. I was just wondering: How much of a critical issue would you view this? Would it be sufficient (bearing in mind this is an interim measure) to change these pages so that they had a canonical or a redirect - they would however remain on the sitemap. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
Kate0 -
Wordpress to HubSpot CMS - I had major crawl issues post launch and now traffic is down 400%
Hi there good looking person! Our traffic went from 12k visitors in july to 3k visitors in july. << www.thedsmgroup.com >>When we moved our site from wordpress to the hubspot COS (their CMS system), I didnt submit a new sitemap to google webmaster tools. I didn't know that I had to... and to be honest, I've never submitted or re-submitted a sitemap to GWT. I have always built clean sites with fresh content and good internal linking and never worried about it. Yoast kind of took care of the rest, as all of my sites and our clients' sites were always on wordpress. Well, lesson learned. I got this message on June 27th in GWT_http://www.thedsmgroup.com/: Increase in not found errors__Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully crawl your site's pages._One month after our site launched we had 1,000 404s on our website. Ouch. Google thought we had a 1,200 page website with only 200 good pages and 1,000 error pages. Not very trust worthy... We never had a 404 ever before this, as we added a plugin to wordpress that would 301 any 404 to the homepage, so we never had a broken link on our site, which is not ideal for UX, but as far as google was concerned, our site was always clean. Obviously I have submitted a new sitemap to GWT a few weeks ago, and we are moving in the right direction... **but have I taken care of everything I need to? I'm not sure. Our traffic is still around 100 visitors per day, not 400 per day as it was before we launched the new site.**Thoughts?I'm not totally freaking out or anything, but a month ago we ranked #1 and #2 for "marketing agency nj", now we aren't in the top 100. I've never had a problem like this. _I added a few screen grabs from Google Webmaster Tools that should be helpful.__Bottom line, have I done everything I need to or do I need to do something with all of these "not found" error details that I have in GWT?_None of these "not found" pages have any value and I'm not sure how Google even found them... For example: http://www.thedsmgroup.com/supersize-page-test/screen-shot-2012-11-06-at-2-33-22-pmHelp! -JasonuhLLtou&h4QmGCW#0 uhLLtou&h4QmGCW#1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlene-Wingfield0 -
Crawling issue
Hello, I am working on 3 weeks old new Magento website. On GWT, under index status >advanced, I can only see 1 crawl on the 4th day of launching and I don't see any numbers for indexed or blocked status. | Total indexed | Ever crawled | Blocked by robots | Removed |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sedamiran
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | I can see the traffic on Google Analytic and i can see the website on SERPS when i search for some of the keywords, i can see the links appear on Google but i don't see any numbers on GWT.. As far as I check there is no 'no index' or robot block issue but Google doesn't crawl the website for some reason. Any ideas why i cannot see any numbers for indexed or crawled status on GWT? Thanks Seda | | | | |
| | | | |0 -
Google webmaster tool (GWT) owner removal issue
Hi! I have a new client, the former agency added the client property with the agency account so we had to create a new GA account (as you can’t transfer ownership at the account level) but we also kept access to the former account to keep historical data. We were granted owner access to the GWT (which is more flexible, you can remove owners and creators) and we now want to remove former agency users. We have 3 adresses. One was verified with delegation method (no pb for removal), one with meta tag (no pb) and one with Google Analytics. Here it becomes tricky as Google says regarding GA verif method “If this account was verified using a Google Analytics tracking code, you should make sure that the user you want to unverify is no longer an administrator on the Analytics account. Otherwise, removal may not be permanent”. The thing is that this user has the same email address as the one used to create the agency GA account (no ownership transfer) so I basically can’t remove admin rights. The other possibility, as Google mentions when I try to unlink this user, is “remove the administrator status in Google Analytics or delete the Google Analytics tracking code on the website”. But we don’t want to remove the code as we still want to track data with the former account for historical analysis purposes. Has anyone ever faced this situation? Do you know how to handle this? Do you think that unlinking the GWT and the GA accounts will unverify the GA method? Many thanks in advance ! Ennick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennick0 -
Canonical url issue
Canonical url issue My site https://ladydecosmetic.com on seomoz crawl showing duplicate page title, duplicate page content errors. I have downloaded the error reports csv and checked. From the report, The below url contains duplicate page content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd And other duplicate urls as per report are,
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&click=colorsu&brands=66 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd But on every these url(all 4) I have set canonical url. That is the original url and an existing one(not 404). https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=0 Then how this issues are showing like duplicate page content. Please give me an answer ASAP.0 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0