Can anyone explain these changes to our Titles in the SERPS?
-
Hi there,
We've been doing well in the SERPS over the past few weeks. Our previous meta title was displayed as:
"Hunter Original Tall - Buy Original Tall Online Here"
However, recently we've seen the title in the SERP switch over to:
"Hunter Original Tall - Cloggs.co.uk"
This has occurred on several of our product pages which display a particular style of a certain brand. So for example:
"Ugg Bailey Button - Cloggs.co.uk"
Has anyone else experienced these changes or can explain why this may have happened?
There is not change to the source code and our Titles have proven to have good click through rates in the past. Any ideas mozzers? -
Barry at Search Engine Roundtable has written about Google choosing their own page titles for your site, and I've seen reports of it here as well, so you're certainly not alone. Here's what Barry has written:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html
-
I'm glad to hear it's happening else where, it doesn't appear to be negatively affecting the SERPs which is a good thing, but I'd really like to know what's causing it.
I've had a look in Webmaster tools and can see no indication there, thought there maybe something in the 'html suggestions' section.
-
Ive been seeing the same thing on and off, so its not just you. But I have no idea why it is happening.
-
Right that's what threw me off as well, and that's why I ruled out the possibility that it was pulling the site titles from the ODP. Here is Google's explanation of how they choose Title/Description snippets. I suppose they could just be pulling it from the content of the website and writing their own, but I've never really encountered that happening without it being related to an external link source. Strange. Hopefully another SEOmozzer can provide better insight.
-
Thanks for the reposne Anthony!
I'll look into it. But would that mean that there is a site somewhere linking to multiple pages on our site with links strong enough to overpower the Title ? it's possible just seems unlikely to be doing across so many different pages.
-
I can't be sure without digging into your site a bit, but Google has been known to use the anchor text of strong links to your website in place of your title tag, on some occasions. This is discussed in this YOUmoz post, Distilled Stole My Page Title.
Could this be the cause?
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
-
Google Country Redirection Change
Analytics is showing a substantial decrease in referring traffic from Google specific regional domains like .ca, .co.uk, .de, etc vs an uptick from .com starting as of March 2018. Did anyone note when this change happened when Google stopped directing traffic to their regional domains? Was there any press about it (couldn't find any). Using a VPN for different countries, I compared regional specific domain SERPs vs .com and they're pretty much identical. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Bragg1 -
How much content is it safe to change?
I have read that it is unsafe to change more than 20% of your site’s content in any update. The rationale is that "Changing too much at once can flag your site within the Google algorithm as having something suspicious going on." Is this true, has anyone had any direct experiences of this or similar?
Algorithm Updates | | GrouchyKids0 -
Lots of dublicate titles and pages on search page
I own a paiting website with a lot of searchable paintings. The "search paintings" feature creates tons of dublicate pages and titles. See here:
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
http://www.maleribasen.dk/soegmaleri.asp I guess the problem is, that the URL can actually be different and still return the same content. First time you click the "Search paintings" the URL will shown as above. But as soon as users
begin to definere they search to the left and use the "Search button" the top URL changes. So, depending on how the top URL looks different results are shown. This is pretty standard in searches. But it returns tons of dublicate pages and titles. How, do you guys cope with that? Is there a clever way to use ref="cannonical" or some other smart way to avoid this? /Kasper0 -
Our organic search traffic went flat for 2 weeks Oct 2 - Oct 17\. It has since resumed to more normal numbers. Anyone have any idea why this would happen?
Does anyone have any insight as to why our organic search traffic would go to nearly nothing for roughly a 2 week span Oct 2 - Oct 17th? Our regular traffic remained fairly consistent so we were still being indexed. It has now resumed to more normal numbers but I cannot think of anything we did that would make this happen? We did make a 302 switch to be a 301 permanent redirect on our site in early August but that is all I can think of? Any insight or help would be appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | mwuest0 -
Has anyone seen this before? One domain dominates the entire first page!
Do a google search for "sober college" and tell me you don't see the entire page filled with one domain. (except the last result)
Algorithm Updates | | EmarketedTeam0 -
If Google doesn’t know we’re hosted in the UK, does that affect our SERPs?
Hi, In November 2011 our eCommerce website dropped from between 3rd and 4th position in the UK SERPs down to 7th and 8th. A year after this happened, we still haven’t moved back up to the original ranking despite all our best efforts and we’re looking for a bit of insight into what could have happened. One of our theories is this, do you think it might be the problem? In October 2011 we moved from a single-site custom built CMS hosted in the UK to a multi-site custom built CMS hosted on a much better server based in the UK. As part of this move we started using CloudFlare to help with security and performance (CloudFlare is a security CDN). Because CloudFlare’s servers are in the US, to the outside world it almost looks like we went from a slow hosting company in the UK to a much quicker hosting company in the US. Could this have affected our rankings? We know that Google takes the server IP address into account as a ranking factor, but as far as we understand it’s because they (rightly) believe that a server closer to the user will perform better. So a UK server will serve up pages quicker to a visitor in the UK than a US server because the data has a shorter distance to travel. However, we’re definitely not experiencing an issue with being recognised as a UK website. We have a .co.uk domain (which is obviously a big indicator) and if you click on “Pages from the UK” in the SERPs we jump up to 3rd place. So Google seems to know we’re a UK site. Is the fact we’re using CloudFlare and hence hiding our real server IP address – is this penalising us in the SERPs? Currently out of the 6 websites above us, 4 are in the US and 2 are in the UK. All of these are massive sites with lots of links, so smaller ranking factors might be more important for us. Obviously the big downside of not using CloudFlare is that our site becomes much less secure and it becomes much slower. Images and some static content is distributed via a local CloudFlare server, which means it should tick Google’s box in terms of providing a quick site for users. CloudFlare say in a blog post that they used to have Google crawl rates and geo-tagging issues in the past when they were just starting out, but in 2010 they started working with “the big search engines” to make sure they treated CloudFlare like a CDN (so special rules that apply to Akamai also apply to CloudFlare). Since they’ve been working with Google, CloudFlare say that their customers will only see a positive SEO impact. So at the moment we’re at a loss about what happened to our ranking. Google say they take IP’s into account for ranking, but by using CloudFlare it looks like we’re in the US. We definitely know we’re not having geo-tagging issues and CloudFlare say they’re working with Google to ensure its customers aren't seeing a negative impact by using CloudFlare, but a niggling part of us still wonders whether it could impact our SEO. Many thanks, James
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0 -
Winning The New SERP Battle
I run a niche website (www.picnic-basket.com) that is approaching 10 years old. I have consistently added new content, performed redesigns, etc and WAS rewarded with a #1 placement on Google for my main keyword phrase for quite a long time. All our links are natural, no link-farms and I don't do exchanges either. I blog, write articles about our niche, have free cookbooks, delicious recipes and are always finding cool new products. FB & Twitter are also maintained. After Panda I'm now below the fold with amazon.com, bedbathandbeyond.com, worldmarket.com, overstock.com and brookstone.com all above me. These sites don't have anything to do with my niche other than just selling some items. ROI is horrible for me with PPC on this keyword phrase. I'm sure Googles' revenue has increased quite a bit in this category because users only see relevant websites up in the paid area. Through years of hard work I was finally able to beat my old niche competitors but I'm left wondering, How do I beat the "Big Boys"? Any advice for someone like me?
Algorithm Updates | | sunriseb0 -
Interesting SERP trend I'm observing
I know Google has been favoring brands a big names lately, but I'm seeing something a bit more alarming Our company offers custom embroidered patches, and through keyword and search research I have discovered that almost all searches for "embroidered patches" are by people who need embroidered patches and are looking to purchase them, or learn more about the process of purchasing them. The SERPs for this term used to be all embroidered patch companies such as ours. In the past month: We've been outranked by a page on Amazon that's fairly irrelevant. An equally irrelevant ebay page has emerged The Wikipedia page for "embroidered patch" is now number seven. This has pushed three other embroidered patch companies off the first page (not that I'm complaining because it wasn't our company . . . yet). My question is, has anyone else noticed something similar happening, where large sites are gaining ground, in spite of the fact that they have low relevance to the search term?
Algorithm Updates | | UnderRugSwept0