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
-
Added a canonical ref tag and SERPs tanked, should we change it back?
My client's CMS uses an internal linking structure that includes index.php at the end of the URLs. The site also works using SEO-friendly URLs without index.php, so the SEO tool identified a duplicate content issue. Their marketing team thought the pages with index.php would have better link equity and rank higher, so they added a canonical ref tag, making the index.php version of the pages the canonical page. As a result, the site dropped in the rankings by a LOT and has not recovered in the last 3-months. It appears that Google had automatically selected the SEO-friendly URLs as the canonical page, and by switching, it re-indexed the entire site. The question we have is, should they change it back? Or will this cause the site to be reindexed again, resulting in an even lower ranking?
Technical SEO | | TienB240 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
Changing the order of items on page against Google Terms & Conditions?
Good day, I am wondering if anybody here has done something like this before. I have a page in one of my sites that contains a number of different - but related - free resources. The resources can be sorted in different ways once the user is on the page. Now I am starting an outreach campaign, and want to be able to send out custom URLS (which pretty much means they have different query strings after them like '?id=123' ) so that when a person clicks on the link to the page it brings up the stuff they are more likely to be interested in at the top. I expect - hope - that some of these people will put links back to this page as a result of this. Now all the links may be slightly different, but they will come to the same page and the content will look slightly different. I will make sure to have the rel=canonical tag in place. Does anybody know if this would be in violation of Google Terms and Conditions. I can't see how, but I wanted to see what the experts here on Moz think before moving forward. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
How can I make Google Webmaster Tools see the robots.txt file when I am doing a .htacces redirec?
We are moving a site to a new domain. I have setup an .htaccess file and it is working fine. My problem is that Google Webmaster tools now says it cannot access the robots.txt file on the old site. How can I make it still see the robots.txt file when the .htaccess is doing a full site redirect? .htaccess currently has: Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
Technical SEO | | RalphinAZ
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?michaelswilderhr.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.s2esolutions.com/ [R=301,L] Google webmaster tools is reporting: Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%.0 -
Looking for someone to help get reconsidered in Google search.
Hi Guys, I need some extra hands and recently got some notifications from Google about unnatural links and this is something I've known about already. I've tried a few times to email webmasters but there is little to no results. I'm looking for some individuals that are great at getting reconsidered to Google. The site I am working on already is being ranked but this is a partial ban. Please PM me your rates and success with previous campaigns. Ideally, I want a flat rate for 100% guarantee reconsideration. TIA!
Technical SEO | | William.Lau0 -
Google indexing tags help
Hey everyone, So yesterday someone pointed out to me that Google is indexing tags and that will likely hurt search engine results. I just did a "site:thetechblock.com" and I notice that tags are still being pulled. http://d.pr/i/WmE6 Today, I went into my Yoast settings and checked "noindex,follow" tags in the Taxomomies settings. I just want to make sure what I'm doing is right. http://d.pr/i/zmbd Thanks guys
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/ MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat0 -
Does daily changing of price information in a title tag damage SEO?
Hi I'm thinking about changing the title tag for all my pages daily, updating it with the most current price information. (As I think this could improve CTR) All the other keywords in the title tag would remain the same however. Does anyone think this is likely to cause a problem with regards to ranking in Google and other search engines? Thanks for any / all replies! Cheers
Technical SEO | | joeprice0