Title tag not changing in Google. Can somebody take a look for me?
-
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin for the website. The website is http://www.emerypharmaservices.com. It appears on the webpage, the title tag is correct (home page should be Contract Laboratory Research Services for Analytical Chemistry and Microbiology), however, in Google it only says Emeryville Pharmaceutical Services. Could this be due to my settings? Please advise.
Thank you
-
Excellent and thorough answer Matt.
-
Hi Matt,
Thank you for your help. The branded title does look nice, but isn't it important if I wanted to rank for those specific keywords that they are included in the title tag?
-
Hi Andy,
This is a fun one! I've checked, and the latest version of the site that Google has cached contains the new <title>, so for some reason it either hasn't update yet or is choosing to ignore the tag. If that's happening, it could be for a few reasons:</p> <ul style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">There's an OpenGraph tag as follows: <span><meta </span><span>property</span><span>='</span><span>og:site_name</span><span>' </span><span>content</span><span>='</span><span>Emeryville Pharmaceutical Services</span><span>'/>. It might be that Google's using that because it doesn't see your title tag as being relevant. If that's the case it's a completely new one on me as I've never seen this happen before.</span></span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span>More likely is that it's a relevancy / length issue, causing one of these to happen: <a href="http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles">http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles</a></span></span></li> </ul> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Looking at your backlink profile and page content, there's nowhere that matches your chosen title so this is the most likely reason. You could try shortening the tag or tweaking your content but, to be honest, why would you want to? The branded title looks far nicer on the SERPs...</span></p> <p><em><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Matt</span></em></p></title>
-
Yes, the tag is a little too long, but how long ago did you change it? It takes some time for Google to update the indexed page titles -- if you've changed it in the last week it probably just hasn't been re-crawled and updated yet.
-
Hi Andy,
I believe the problem is that your title tag is too long. Google can only display about 70 characters maximum for a title and yours is 79 characters long. Count includes spaces and punctuation too. Make a title that fits within that limitation and Google should display it.
Dana
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
-
Duplicate Meta Titles and Descriptions Issue in Google Webmaster Tool
Hello All, We have one site named http://www.bargains-online.com.au/ & have some categories along with filter option on left side like filter by price & by brand, ect. We have already set rel canonical tags on all filtered pages, but still those all pages showing duplicate page titles and description warning in HTML Improvements section in Google Webmaster Tool. For Example: http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners.html We've set rel canonical tag on below pages. http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/manufacturer:black-eagle.html http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:2,100.html http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:3,100.html Kindly request if anybody has any solutions for the same, please share with us. Thanks, Akshay
Technical SEO | | akshaydesai0 -
Redirect 301 issue. I changed my domain name and Google is killing me.
Hello SEO community: I have this problem, and I don't know exactly what to do. I recently changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com uclasificados.net was a free classified ads for USA in spanish, and was my most affortable site, so I wanted to convert it to .com because I thought it could get more popular with the .com domain. uclasificados.com was before a free classified ads website for Colombia, but was not very popular and had poor traffic so I moved the Colombian content to uclasificados.co. Since I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com I have lost a lot of ranking, and l my traffic every day is getting lower. I have already checked the 301 redirections and they are working correctly, but even thought I keep getting less traffic and less money. I have also checked with moz tools both sites link juice, and it says that uclasificados.net have better reputation. So I was wondering if I change it back and redirect uclasificados.com to uclasificados.net but I worrie that if I do that, maybe I can make things worse. What do you recommend me?
Technical SEO | | capmartin850 -
Moved a site and changed URL structures: Looking for help with pay
Hi Gents and Ladies Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post. **The background story: ** My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is. **Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: ** The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's... Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds). As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now. SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other. The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed). **On to the questions: ** **What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. ** If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).
Technical SEO | | mattylac0 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
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 -
Why Can't I Get on Google?
I've employed many of the suggestions of SEOMoz and getting a Grade "A" on a particular keyword. I'm now #4 on Yahoo and Bing. However, my site hasn't cracked the top 50 in Google. Why? I see a similar pattern with other keywords, many on yahoo and bing but only a few of my subpages get #45-48 on Google. Any ideas? http://www.gospelebooks.net
Technical SEO | | mrjgardiner0 -
Title tag same text as H1?
What is the group's opinion on whether or not the <title>tag should have the exact same text as the <h1> tag on the same page? Obviously both should contain the phrase that page is optimized for but is it better to have them be variants of each other, or both the same and maybe equal to the key phrase that page is optimized for? Thanks.</p> <p>Example:</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p>title: los angeles blue widgets</p> <p>h1: los angeles blue widgets</p> </blockquote> <p>Or,</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p>title: los angeles blue widgets</p> <p>h1: blue widgets in los angeles</p> </blockquote> <p>Where the page is trying to optimize for "los angeles blue widgets"</p></title>
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
Google Shopping Australia/Google Merchant Centre
So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.
Technical SEO | | Brendo0