Google not showing the proper title
-
I noticed that google is not showing the proper title in the search results. If you search for PhraseExpander, the title that google reports is:
PhraseExpander: Text Expander for Windows
but in the title of the page I've set Text Expander for Windows - PhraseExpander
Why is that? How can I make google report the proper title?
Thanks.
Andrea
-
Yeah Matt is right they have been doing this for a while, they also change the description too sometimes.
-
Interestingly, I also notice it when I do a site search (using Google's site search).
We do not use a CMS for the main site, only for the blog.
Google seem to have taken the suffix from the blog and pasted it as the suffix in the title for all of our pages. We changed the blog's suffix to "- Brand" about a week ago but it may have not been indexed yet... -
That's strange.
Our title is:
Brand - Title
And only within the index they changed it to Title: Brand
Does this means that I should write the titles as: "Brand: Title" instead of the dash?
Although sometimes it had helped us (having title: Brand), that's only when the searcher goes for something like TITLE. But only for those exact searched.
-
I think I noticed it in February or so this year.
Here are some articles on it: http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand
http://yoast.com/google-page-title/
http://www.colewood.net/latest-news/google-rewrites-page-titles-and-forces-further-brand-building/
I've had clients start rewriting some of their own titles this way as Google seems to prefer brand:title I haven't rewritten it on my own site so I can watch the changes happen. (My own site is far too often a "testing ground." haha
-
I noticed tis on one of my sites also. How long have they been doing this? I know they have been doing so for a long time if you have no title or a generic title like "home", but it was only recent that I noticed putting the brand at the front.
I also noticed that it is not doing so for my US sites just my Australian sites
-
Google will often change your page titles if they can find a way to make them relate more to the search query. They have started focusing on "brands" more and they seem to prefer
Brand: title
If you search my site using just highonseo you will see the
Brand: title
And it's different than the actual site title.
You can limit this a little but using NoODP, NoYDIR but if they want to change it, they will. Just write really good, related titles and you shouldn't have it changed too often.
-
I looked at http://yoast.com/google-page-title/ and it seems that google sometimes takes the liberty to change the title of the page displayed in the results.
That's probably the reason why this is happening.
-
Thanks for the info. I'm using Yoast SEO on wordpress to put the title of the page.
I've tried changing the title removing the -. Let's see what happens.
But as you suggested I've checked another page
if you type "Download PhraseExpander" in google the proper title is not returned again.
The title that is returned is: "Download - PhraseExpander" but the title of the page is <title>Free PhraseExpander Trial - Try our text expander software for free</title>
I did a test and noticed that titles are properly returned in Bing (but not in google). What could be the issue?
Thanks.
Andrea -
This could possibly have something to do with the way your CMS handles the "-" punctuation elements between your two phrases. If you aren't using actual HTML markup for it, try changing to the HTML version, which would be: -
Conversely, if you are using the HTML markup, try taking it out and just using the -
Let me know if that helps at all....of course you will have to wait until Google recrawls the page to find out if it worked. If this is the issue, you will want to check your other pages to make sure it's not happening on them too.
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
-
Why home Page is not showing showing in search results?
The USA Glitz I search the exact title & keyword but still its not showing though there is no related websites in this term. What can i do ? What kind of strategy needs to follow ? Kindly help me out . Thanks 😢
On-Page Optimization | | henrichjrr4201 -
How does Google handle read more tags in Wordpress
Hi Everyone I am wondering how Google handles the read more tag in Wordpress. I pasted the link to a blog post on Google and found nothing (domain.com/post#readmore). Then I paste the version without #readmore (domain.com/post) and found that Google indexed the page but with the option to click "read more" to read it. The full blog post is not in their index, just the version asking you to read more. Is this because Google hasn't gotten to it or is Google ignoring it. I am not sure but ideally I rather have the full blog post indexed, not the read more version. I am curious to whether this will cause duplicate content issues. What are your experience with this and is it advisable to use an alternate method for read more. Maybe with a Wordpress plugin. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | gaben0 -
Google Xml Sitemaps
Which plugin is good to use to create and submit my sitemap: sitemap from yoast or google xml sitemap plugin?
On-Page Optimization | | Sebastyan22
Which one is better? I already saw this video but I get an error when I submited it to webmaster tools and I don't know why:http://www.quicksprout.com/university/how-to-set-up-and-optimize-a-sitemap/_''Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.''_Thank you !0 -
Prices in title tag
At our ecommerce site adwords ads generally perform a lot better when the product price is included in the ad title. Does anyone here have any experience and data on CTR with including product prices in title tags of product / category pages?
On-Page Optimization | | ese0 -
How dangerous are duplicate page titles
We ran a SEO crawl and on our report it flag up duplicate pages titles, we investigate further and found that these were page titles from the same product line that had more than one page, e.g 1-50 (products) 51-100 (products) with a next button to move to the following 50 products. These where flagged as duplicate page titles ".../range-1/page-1" and ".../range-1/page-2" These titles are obviously being read as duplicates but because they are the same range we do not know what the best course of action is. We want to know how detrimental these page titles will be to our SEO if at all. If anyone could shed some light on this issue it would be a massive help. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SimonDixon0 -
Does Google look at page design
Hi everybody, At the moment i'm creating several webshops and websites with the same layout, so visitors can recognize the websites are from the same company. But i was wondering: Does google look at the layout of a webpage that it's not a copy of another website? This because loads of website have the same wordpress/joomla templates etc, or doesn't this effect rankingpositions? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | iwebdevnl0 -
Is my H1 and H2 site structure proper?
If I have an h1 tag on the page that describes the purpose of the page, is it a bad idea to make all of the sub-headings h2 tags? A designer mentioned that it was frowned upon to make all of the secondary headings into h2 tags, or to use CSS to selectively style the heading tags.
On-Page Optimization | | dbuckles0 -
Why is On-Page showing canonical wrong?
I'm trying to use the On-Page report card and it's saying that my rel=canonical is wrong, I've looked and I can't see anything wrong with it, am I missing something? The url is www.harrisonlighting.co.uk/childrens-lights.html
On-Page Optimization | | HarrisonLighting0