Why Google scrambles/change our product page titles? And descriptions too?
-
Here is an interesting issue we are noticing lately: Google is always more scrambling and changing the title of our product pages in the SERPs results.
Here is an example:
Keyword: "bach arioso sheet music". We are down at the 6th spot, and the shown title is different from what's defined inside the TITLE tag of that page.
And that appears often for other keywords/product pages. Why's that? How can we control that? It is hard for us to optimize titles and test CTR and other metrics if Google is showing them differently to the users.
Similar issue with the description tag: sometimes Google instead of showing to the users the description tag contents, shows part of the text taken from the page even though the searched keywords are included both in the title and the description tag, and so I can't find justification to show text taken from the page instead... it is quite difficult to understand the motivation beyond all this!
Any thoughts are very welcome. Thanks!
Fab.
-
Yes, that makes sense... I will do that. Thanks!
-
You need to change it to something less keyword stuffed and less spammy looking that you are happy with and see how Google handles it. Experiment.
BTW, you and I may not think your title is keyword stuffed or spammy, but that does not matter - what matters is the algorithm is interpreting it as that, so you need to change it to get the title in the search results that is better than what Google is deciding for you.
-
Hmm... I guess I need to test a little bit more on this. That's good to know, thank you!
-
I think the way Google change them is often terrible, and I don't understand why it changes my titles and not my competitors' when they are pretty much all alike. I don't see much logic here... anyhow, if this is the way it works and there is nothing I can do about it, that's ok. I will make some more research on this topic. Thanks!
-
Yeah, I can understand that, but how can I test different titles, wording, etc if Google change them anyway? That becomes something hard to test... am I wrong?
-
Agreed, Google tend to change them when the algorithm perceives that the title of the page is not useful to the searcher. This usually happens when the title is spammy or keyword stuffed. Google is trying to better serve the searcher and not the webmaster by doing this. You need to experiment/split test the title.
-
Google tends to scramble the title tag and description tag up if they think that it will serve the user better based on the provided search query.
Sometimes Google changes title tags so they'll contain branding purposes.
Anyway nothing is wrong with Google changing your title and/or description tags. Google always serves what they think is best for the users. I've noticed that they were scrambling my things up too and they actually helped me improve my title tag.
-
Why not change it to the way Google is displaying it? Maybe they like that better
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
-
Video titles and descriptions
Hi everyone, I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself? I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How to get product info into Google Search Result box
Hi, in the last couple of weeks I get more and more search results with a product and prices of retailers below (see sample attached). Are there Schema parameters one could use to have a bigger chance to appear there? Thanks in advance Dieter Lang 0EYJtRJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco1 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Duplicate page title at bottom of page - ok, or bad?
Can I get you experts opinion? A few years ago, we customized our pages to repeat the page title at the bottom of the page. So the page title is in the breadcrumbs at the top, and then it's also at the bottom of the page under all the contents. Here is a sample page: bit.ly/1pYyrUl I attached a screen shot and highlighted the second occurence of the page title. Am worried that this might be keyword stuffing, or over optimizing? Thoughts or advice on this? Thank you so much! ron ZH8xQX6
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Product Descriptions for a product with many designs
I'm a newbie with SEO and I have a question regarding product descriptions. Let's say I am selling 100 dog id tags. The tags are all made of same materials, same size, just different designs. Now for the product description, do I need to write a different set of description for all 100 tags? This is an example of a short product description(there's more) for all the pet tags: Personalized with 4 lines of information and 20 characters in each line. Lifetime guarantee - If your pet ID tag ever becomes illegible, we will replace it free of charge. Solid one-piece construction - No glued or ""sandwiched"" materials to wear out or fall apart. Split ring for collar attachement included with EVERY tag. Countless uses - School backpacks, luggage, fashion accessories, and many more! All of the above information pertains to all the pet tags. Can all my product descriptions contain that information, or will I need to modify this 100 times for each individual pet tag? I read up a lot on duplicate content so I am slightly confused. Will this hurt my SEO? Thanks, Keith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ktw0160 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Google Map embed on Contact Us page
Greetings Mozzers, When doing a website, we generally link a Google Map image of the company to the Google Maps in a new tab. Reading other questions made us wonder. Is it better to do the above or is it more beneficial to SEO to have a Google Map embedded on the website. Which I guess means it links Google to the Business in one way? Thanks for any/all responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero0