Why "title missing or empty" when title tag exists?

[groovykarma]

Greetings!  On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24).

• "Title missing or empty" was 9,676.
• "Duplicate page content" was 9,678.

Whoa!  Content at site has not changed.

I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag.

Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar.

I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place .

In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler.  I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages.   Titles were found and hash codes were unique.  Hmmm.

Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com

Small sample of pages with errors:

• electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
  electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
  electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html

I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot.

What am I missing please?

Thanks kindly, Loren

[groovykarma]

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for the reply.  Yes, content for millions of part numbers is hard to come by for one's own use.  It's proprietary for most companies.

When we have more part information, such as a part we have sold, I have a plethora of good information on that part because we've inspected in (photos, detailed visual examination, etc).  Example: http://parts.usbid.com/SAA7115HL.html

Yet, there are millions of parts we can sell to people that we haven't actually sold yet.  We have hundreds of vendors. We can procure parts from other sources for our customers (as well as out of our own inventory). Since we offer hard-to-find parts, businesses come to us when they cannot find it via other channels.

How do they search?  They dump the number in Google and look for reputable sites that can provide a quote on that part (qty, manufacturer, etc).

So, many times all I have is the part number and a list of those on the page **is not great content.  So admitted. ** It's the best I have to generate a lead.

If you have strong thoughts on SEO attention and content for the arena in which we play, I'm all ears.  Like I mentioned to Cyrus, I am looking to work with talented people to improve content and SEO.  Whom do you recommend?

Kindly, Loren

[groovykarma]

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  On Rogerbot's challenge crawling our site and vice-versa, is there a data dump or other clues on what went wrong?  You got me halfway there identifying a crawl problem.   The next step is for me to understand/reproduce (and fix) the black box to which you refer.

Care to use your super powers to shine a bit more light in the box for me?

Title tags are too long.  I agree and will change.

Also, you are perceptive and spot-on for the scalability of this content.  When I have many more attributes than part number (such as manufacturer, data code, description, photos, etc) we have those on "single part pages."  Those pages are more descriptive and "content worthy."

The problem is that we have only so much content for part information.  If I could buy it, believe me, I'd purchase, enhance and publish that information.  (Manufacturer datasheets already exist and are for engineers more than our audience).

Our business is to provide hard-to-find parts.  So, we need to show up in searches when purchasers dump a manufacturer part number into a search engine (yep, when it's hard to find, that's what businesses do to search).

So, I need to scale the best I can with content of this type.  We experiment quite a bit.  If you have ideas for me or know of someone to engage for a thoughtful experiment, I am willing to engage talent to assist.

Again, thank you.  I hope you'll give me a bit more insight into an error dump (a few lines maybe) so I can see what's up.  I will validate and clean up HTML today.

Any follow-up thoughts?

Kindly, Loren

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Loren,

I took a peek at your website, and checked some things behind the scenes using my super-awesome administrative powers here at SEOmoz. It looks like one of two things happened.

1. Rogerbot encountered an error when crawling your site
2. Your site had trouble with rogerbot.

In either case, you probably want to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org), especially if the problem persist in the next crawl report.

On another note..

Those extra-long title tags might cause some crawlers a little confusion. I'm not saying they're bad for you, but I doubt they are helping you much from a search engine point of view. Undoubtedly, I'd say with near certainty that Google is not indexing the entirety of your title tags. Paginated lists like this are tough to get indexed properly. If folks are actually searching for these obscure part numbers, perhaps this is the only way to scale it. That said, I would encourage you to experiment.

[RyanKent]

Hi Loren.

I took a look at the pages you shared. There is definitely a problem with the title. The Title field is supposed to have a maximum of 70 characters. Anything beyond that is cut off. I've seen some titles go a bit past that but your first page has a title with over 500 characters, and the second page you list has over 600 characters.

Another problem is the title's purpose is to let users and search engines understand the topic of the page. All of your titles begin with "Electronic Parts". Duplicating the same term at the beginning of all your titles is very bad for SEO.

Each page requires a unique, relevant, readable title under 70 characters.

Additionally, the page content is really poor. These are not indexable pages. Your pages all have the identical header, footer and sidebar which is understandable. Then you offer the exact same form at the top. After there is just a very long list of part numbers. There is no readable text, no sentences, no paragraphs, nothing to index except hundreds of part numbers.

Your site requires major SEO attention if you wish to be listed in search engines.