Old site name showing in SERPs

[JamieCMF]

Hi all,

We've recently re-launched one of our sites with a substantial redesign, refreshed content, meta data, descriptions and functionality.

We noticed in SERPs that some of the page titles are showing the old name for the site, which hasn't been used for a few years and the site's been through a few updates and a URL change since then.

All the meta titles showing up as they should in crawls through Search Console and Moz and it's my understanding that if Google were pulling a cached version of a title it would have gone for a more recently cached one?

Any thoughts on why Google's turned back the clock on our site's name would be greatly appreciated!

-Jamie

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks for the follow up! There was also some indexing issues going on with google last week (pages were taking hours to get indexed, even using the fetch and render tool) so maybe this was somehow related. Glad it's resolved for now!

[JamieCMF]

Hiya Dan,

Many thanks for your response, our site is: www.creditreport.co.uk

It seems like in the last week we've stopped experiencing this issue, but until we get to the cause of it there's always a possibility it could happen again.

Going by what you've said, I think it's most likely the 301 issue: our old site was much larger so there are a lot of pages currently getting 301'd to the homepage as there isn't a relevant alternative page to redirect users to at the moment.

Everything else you've mentioned has already checked out, I even did a backlink audit a few weeks ago because I had the same suspicion, but there weren't enough sites linking to us using the old name as the anchor text to cause an issue.

Thanks again for your help!

-Jamie

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Jamie

There could be a number of reasons this is happening. It's tough to say for sure without knowing the site and taking a look (feel free to mention that if you can).

But I would check all the basic accessibility stuff first, ie:

• Make sure you are allowing crawling of the old site and new site (not blocking with robots.txt)
• Be sure your 301s are setup for 1:1 content/page matches - in other words - don't 301 a bunch of old pages to the homepage, because this can confuse google and also it doesn't pass any value anyway (references here and here)
• Check that your canonical tag usage is correct - ie: a canonical if used incorrectly can point the wrong signals at the wrong page)
• Make sure you have the old site/property registered in search console, and see if the indexed page #'s are going down.

ALSO: What you're seeing in SERPs might be based upon old anchor text and links (off-site signals) - you may want to see if you can update old back links from an anchor text standpoint.

But any details you could provide would be helpful!

[JamieCMF]

Hiya James, thanks for your response-

It seems like we might be suffering similar issues if not necessarily exactly the same thing. Before our latest re-design we had a load more pages that were cut, most of them should 301 to the homepage, but some of those pages are returning a 404.

I think the main difference is that most of our page titles are showing up fine, reflecting our latest changes, but the homepage and another one about legal information have gone retro on us, which makes me think our site is at least getting crawled properly?