Google Not Indexing Description or correct title (very technical)
-
Hey guys,
I am managing the site: http://www.theattractionforums.com/
If you search the keyword "PUA Forums", it will be in the top 10 results, however the title of the forum will be "PUA Forums" rather than using the code in the title tag, and no description will display at all (despite there being one in the code).
Any page other than the home-page that ranks shows the correct title and description.
We're completely baffled! Here are some interesting bits and pieces:
-
It shows up fine on Bing
-
If I go into GWT and Fetch as Google Bot, it shows up as "Unreachable" when I try to pull the home-page.
-
We previously found that it was pulling 'index.htm' before 'index.php' - and this was pulling a blank page. I've fixed this in the .htaccess however to make it redirect, however this hasn't solved the problem.
-
I've disallowed it from pulling the description .etc from the Open Directory with the use of meta tags - didn't change anything.
It's vBulletin and is running vBSEO
Any suggestions at all guys?
I'll be forever in anyones debt who can solve this, it's proving to be near impossible to fix.
Here is the .htaccess file, it may be a part of the issue:
RewriteEngine On
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
Redirect /index.html http://www.theattractionforums.com/index.php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.theattractionforums.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [L,R=301]RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*.(xml|txt)(.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron|vbseo_sitemap/)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(..php(/.)?)?)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^forum/(.*)$ http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
-
Hey guys,
SEOmoz's software done a crawl for me, and we got a crawl error at this page:
http://www.theattractionforums.com/%3Ca%20href=
This translates to:
http://www.theattractionforums.com/<a href=
What do you think is going on? So confused!
-
Hi Guys,
I've fixed up the above, the 'meta name' and the 'title' issues - however this still doesn't seem to explain why Google wouldn't be able t crawl the page.
It also seems strange that Google would choose NO description over one that is provided. While theoretically plausible, I would find it extremely odd.
Thanks guys,
JC
-
I don't know if this is specifically related but I spotted a typo in your homepage's source code while reviewing this. You have this code: <metaname="robots" <span="">content="noodp,noydir" /></metaname="robots">
in your HTML head. There should be a space between meta and name in that tag. I didn't spot anything else that jumped out to me as wrong. I'd fix that tag for sure, and I hope someone else here can help illuminate further.
Best,
-
The reason it is not using your title is you have stuffed it with keywords
PUA Forums | The Attraction Forums | Free Men's Dating Forum | The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed
its 118 characters long, it should be 65 at most, google will not use such a title
somthing like
Free Men's Dating Forum | PUA Forums
would be better, remember its a title not a short story, just give the poeple an idea, dont try to give them a sales picth
google picks a description that matchs the query, it is hard to predict when it will use your description tag.
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
-
In the google index but search redirects to homepage
Hi everyone, thanks for reading i have a website "www.gardeners.scot" and have the following pages listed in google site: command http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-landscaping-Edinburgh.htm & http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-maintenance-Edinburgh.htm however when a user searches for "garden landscaping Edinburgh" or "garden maintenance Edinburgh" we are in the rankings but google search links these phrases to the home page not to their targeted pages. the site is about a year old have checked the robots.txt, sitemap.xml & .htaccess files but can see anything wrong there. any ideas out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Google Index Status Falling Fast - What should I be considering?
Hi Folks, Working on an ecommerce site. I have found a month on month fall in the Index Status continuing since late 2015. This has resulted in around 80% of pages indexed according to Webmaster. I do not seem to have any bad links or server issues. I am in the early stages of working through, updating content and tags but am yet to see a slowing of the fall. If anybody has tips on where to look for to issues or insight to resolve this I would really appreciate it. Thanks everybody! Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Toby-Symec0 -
Sitemap Indexation
When we use HTML sitemap. Many a times i have seen that the sitemap itself gets mapped to keywords which it shouldn't have got to. So should we keep the HTML sitemap as No-Index, Follow or does anyone has a better solution that the sitemap doesn't show-up for other keyword terms that actually isn't representing this page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Google Not Pulling The Right Title Tag & Meta Description
Hi guys. We've found Google is pulling the wrong information for our title tag and meta description. Instead of pulling the actual title tag, Google is pulling the menu name you click on to get to the page: "Bike Barcelona" instead of "Barcelona Bike Tours | ...." Also, we've found that, instead of pulling the meta description we wrote, Google is using text from the pages copy. Any tips?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BarcelonaExperience0 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
Hi, we are a South African insurance company. We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance. Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely. This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes". The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery. The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car". Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | miway0 -
Buying a Google News website, against Google Terms?
We are looking at buying a business that has a number of websites Is it against buying a business that has a Google News website and continue to use the site? Once the business is sold, would google remove the site from its News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Member request pages, indexed or no indexed?
We run a service website and basically users of the site post their request to get certain items fixed/serviced. Through Google Analytics we have found that we got lots of traffic to these request pages from people searching for those particular items. E.g. A member's request page: "Cost to fix large Victorian oven" has got many visits from searchers searching for "large Victorian oven". The traffic to these pages is about 40% of our Google organic traffic but didn't covert to more users/requests well and has roughly 67% bounce rate. So my question is: should we keep these pages indexed and if yes what can we do to improve the conversion rate/reduce bounce rate? Many thanks guys. David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0