Why "title missing or empty" when title tag exists?
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.
- Rogerbot encountered an error when crawling your site
- 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.
-
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.
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
-
Page with "random" content
Hi, I'm creating a page of 300+ in the near future, on which the content basicly will be unique as it can be. However, upon every refresh, also coming from a search engine refferer, i want the actual content such as listing 12 business to be displayed random upon every hit. So basicly we got 300+ nearby pages with unique content, and the overview of those "listings" as i might say, are being displayed randomly. Ive build an extensive script and i disabled any caching for PHP files in specific these pages, it works. But what about google? The content of the pages will still be as it is, it is more of the listings that are shuffled randomly to give every business listing a fair shot at a click and so on. Anyone experience with this? Ive tried a few things in the past, like a "Last update PHP Month" in the title which sometimes is'nt picked up very well.
Technical SEO | | Vanderlindemedia0 -
Duplicate Title Tags How harmful is it?
I recently updated a site to use a new WordPress theme. This theme in conjunction with Yoast SEO plugin is causing duplicate Title tags. The tags have the same title in them. I discovered this when adding new keywords and pages to the page optimizer in moz. I have since turned off moz to stop the duplicate title tag issue however I am wondering if tuning off yoast is worse then the duplicate title tags. Any clarification on the duplicate page title issue and its consequences would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Using "Div's" to place content at top of HTML
Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Hash tag
We are using the hash tag on our redesign for faceted search. So, for example it will look like this www.example.com#fun123. I was looking into how i could exclude my faceted search from my robots.txt, but i was recently told I wouldnt need to do this since Googlebot doesnt index the hash tags or anything after it anyway. All of the articles I've read online do not give me a straight answer. Has google answered this one for certain? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CHECOM0 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
How can we fix duplicate title tags like these being reported in GWT?
Hi all, I posted this in the GWT Forum on Monday and still no answers so I will try here. Our URL is http://www.ccisolutions.com
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
We have over 200 pages on our site being flagged by GWT as having
duplicate title tags. The majority of them look similar to this: Title: <a>JBL EON MusicMix 16 | Mixer | CCI Solutions</a> GWT is reporting these URLs to have all the same title: /StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Category/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Footer/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Header/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=../StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=GoogleBase These are all the same page. There was a time when we used these origin codes, but we stopped using them over a year ago. We also added canonical tags to every page to prevent us from having duplicate content issues. However, these origin codes are
still showing up in GWT. Is there anything we can do to fix this problem. Do we have a technical issue with our site code and the way Google is seeing our dynamic URLs? Any suggestions on how we can fix this problem? The same is true in our report for Meta descriptions. Thanks
you,
Dana Tan0 -
How "Optimised" is my home page content
Good afternoon from 1 degrees C overcast frozen wetherby UK... I've made a number of on page html markup changes to optimise the page for steel suppliers steel stockholders but I'd like to know if there are any other on page improvments I could make for this page http://www.barrettsteel.com/ Im particulary concerned that contnet in in li tags and not p, could this be an issue? And finaaly on the home page a third party developer has slapped a header banner pointing to an external site know as woodberry tools, that cant be good can it? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
We are still seeing duplicate content on SEOmoz even though we have marked those pages as "noindex, follow." Any ideas why?
We have many pages on our website that have been set to "no index, follow." However, SEOmoz is indexing them as duplicate content. Why is that?
Technical SEO | | cmaseattle0