Google is changing the title
-
Hi!
Lately i have seen that Google changed the page titles for some clients, not all... its about 30% of them.
For example, the title looks likes this after the Google change:
Company name: SEO and Pay per click management
But in on that page it looks like this:
SEO and Pay per click management - Company name
Does anyone know why?
-
I've seen the same thing on some of my sites...
This guy provides a pretty good analysis
http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand
It sounds like it's not so much about colons, but more about moving brands to the front of the title. Only time will tell whether it's a test or a permanent change.
I also want to add that I've seen this for general searches that do not include my company name / brand.
-
Hi Lynn!
In this case im doing a search without company name, like "SEO"
-
Hi Vincenzo!
I just sent you some screenshots. Please take a look at them. And get back to me if you need more info.
-
Thanks! I will take a look at the articles.
-
Interesting links, I hadn't seen these.
In my case the colon is not being used, although the original site title has a pipe separator in it. The page title is being displayed as the exact search phrase (which admittedly is not far off the original page title) but with rearranged wording and a couple of words left out entirely!
I'm in a non English market, not sure how that might effect the results.
-
Hey Daniel
You might be interested in reading this article and this thread on Inbound.org that brought this up a couple of weeks ago.
Too early to say what the potential ramifications might be, but I would say it's a safe assumption to make that Google is focusing more on more on promoting trustworthy brands. Bringing the brand name to the front often helps the user navigate through the SERPs, as opposed to the SEO optimised titles that we see out there.
Think we'll have to wait and see on this one, but hopefully those 2 links can help for the time being.
-
I have seen this also on a client site.
Not sure by any means, but it seems to happen when the search is for company brand + term, which i think is happening quite a lot in the market my client's site is in.
So in your case, if there are searches being done for 'Company name' + PPC Management for example, then Google seems to be switching the page title to match the search phrase.
That is what I could make out of it anyway... anyone else seeing this?
-
Is there a common denominator with the sites -
Wordpress - etc?
I am curious to see an example - if you could private message me - or even email me.
Your pal,
Chenzo
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
-
Can OG titles be used as a substitute for Meta titles
We use og (open graph) titles in lieu of meta titles. Is there any downside to using just one. Should we be using both og and meta titles on our page. Appreciate any insight. Himanshu
Technical SEO | | patilhimanshu0 -
Google Dancing?
Hello, I was wondering why my website for some keywords goes from 2nd 3rd page in Google to 7th or even more sometimes? This happens since a while. Any suggestion? Thanks. Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Homepage disappeared from Google Serp
I redirected my domain using this code in .htaccess : RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xxxx.com
Technical SEO | | digitalkiddie
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L]
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]/)index.(html?|php)(?[^\ ])?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]/)*)index.(html?|php)$ http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> A day after I did it, got an error in GWMT "Google can't find your site's robots.txt" and my homepage disappeared from the result pages. When I try to open Google cache of the homepage I got an error 404. I generated new robots.txt, uploaded it , now the error doesnt show but still my homepage is not in the serps. Its been 3 days. What should I do ? Thanks in advance "Google can't find your site's robots.txt" error? - Pro ...0 -
Google Change of Address with Questionable Backlink Profile
We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com. The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape. The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help. The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank. However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on. I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes. So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed? **To my mind I have 3 options. ** 1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action. 2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site. 3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post. What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.
Technical SEO | | LukeHardiman0 -
Google Trusted Ranking effect?
We are looking into getting the google Trusted badge. We meet the requirements and now just deciding if it is worth the time to do it now or later. Has anyone noticed a difference in your organic rankings or PLAs with it. What about conversion rates? Any input would be great!
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Change name of directory
How can I best change the name of a directory on my website (example: http://www.website.com/nameofdirectory/)? The directory has lots of content included in it which has links from all over my website. I guess I have to adjust those links? How do I easily collect all of the links? Which is the code I should use in my htacces? Thank you! With kind regards,
Technical SEO | | wellnesswooz
Dieter0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860 -
Why do I see dramatic differences in impressions between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Insights for Search?
Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search. What might be the reason for this discrepancy?
Technical SEO | | ir-seo-account0