Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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 -
Schema markup for products is missing "price": Is this bad?
Hey guys, So a current client of mine has an e-commerce shop with a few hundred products. They purposely choose to keep the prices off of their website, which is causing errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Basically the error shows: Error: Structured Data > Product (markup: schema.org) Error type: missing price 208 items with error Is this a huge deal? Or are we allowed to have non-numerical prices for schema ie. "call for quote"
Technical SEO | | tbinga1 -
Isnt it better to have headlines in H1 and H2 tags instead of p tags?
I am working with a simple site http://http://lightsigns.com/Uniko_Manufacturing_Limited.html They seek more SEO traffic. However, the two big headlines that read "Wholesale Supply to the Sign and Display Industries" which is on line 241 and 242 of the source code, its in a p tag, i.e. <p <span class="webkit-html-tag">style</p <span>="padding-top: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style_1">Wholesale Supply to the and <p <span class="webkit-html-tag">style</p <span>="padding-bottom: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style_1">Sign and Display Industries Likewise, the product titles are in p tags, also. For example, on the Slide-in Light Box product page, http://lightsigns.com/Slide_In_light_box.html , I have done keyword research and no one is using the words slide in light box.Plus, it is also a p tag, ie. line 43 reads style="padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-top: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style">Slide-in Light Box If I suggest that they make an H2 tag with SEO-optimized keywords such as Display Light Box - Slide-In LIght Box, would this indeed help SEO? In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?
Technical SEO | | BridgetGibbons1 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Rel="external"
Hi all, I got a link and its off a site and marked up with rel="external". Is this a followed or nofollowed link? Does it pass link juice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sharer0 -
Google is Showing Website as "Untitled"
My freelance designer made some changes to my website and all of a sudden my homepage was showing the title I have in Dmoz. We thought maybe the NOODP tag was not correct, so we edited that a little and now the site is showing as "Untitled". The website is http://www.chemistrystore.com/. Of course he didn't save an old copy that we can revert to. That is a practice that will end. I have no idea why the title and description that we have set for the homepage is not showing in google when it previously was. Another weird thing that I noticed is that when I do ( site:chemistrystore.com ) in Google I get the https version of the site showing with the correct title and description. When I do ( site:www.chemistrystore.com ) in Google I don't have the hompage showing up from what I can tell, but there are 4,000+ pages to the site. My guess is that if it is showing up, it is showing up as "Untitled". My question is.... How can we get Google to start displaying the proper title and description again?
Technical SEO | | slangdon0 -
Header Tags
Ok so I am writing different pages and the first heading is an H3 just because I wanted to it be a certain size. Then as you see the content, I have an H1 tag. Example page: http://www.oxfordmshomes.net/condos/acadia-court-Oxford-MS you can see that "Acadia First" is the first thing you see on the page and it uses an H3 element. Long story short, my hierarchy is wrong. Does this have any negative effect on my SEO efforts?
Technical SEO | | blake-766240 -
Is "last modified" time in XML Sitemaps important?
My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites. His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not. What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0