Is Google indexing something I can't see on my page title?

[colourpages]

When I do a search for my businesses website (colourpages.com) it returns a listing which is great but the title tag includes Hull Colour Pages which is our old brand name - we changed to colourpages.com 2 years ago yet Hull Colour Pages is still pulling through on the title tag.

I have checked the source and it's as follows:

<title>Plumbers in Hull - Reviews - colourpages.com</title>

I have attached a photo which shows the issue - http://imgur.com/Cva3001

Is Google indexing it from old history that is no longer visible or am I missing something?

Cva3001

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

Google will rewrite page titles when they believe the rewritten title provides a better or more accurate description of your site. This may be due to what they see as poor page titles or that the revision makes the title closer to users search query so they would be more likely to click through.

Some stated reasons for doing this are:

• Titles are particularly short
• Titles are shared across large parts of your site
• Titles appear to be mostly a collection of keywords

Here is a quote from Google on why they do this:

"If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."

In your case they are showing the whole page title but adding the brand onto the end as they are not seeing the "colourpages.com" bit as being the brand.

Now, there is no way to directly control this but I can think of a few things to look at straight away.

1. Google use lots of brand signals and ideally all listings of your business should be consistent but, they are not. In fact, there are lots of mentions of your old brand. So, if we search for the old brand, your postcode and remove listings from our own site we find lots and lots of listings:

"hull colour pages"  -www.colourpages.com "HU1 3RE"

"hull colour pages"  -www.colourpages.com

I would claim and tidy these for starters.

2. I would make a small change to your page title as well and change the brand to "Colour Pages" and use a different seperator to show this is not just a "collection of keywords". Something like:

Plumbers in Hull - Reviews | Colour Pages

Here we have a clearly branded page title that is easier to understand and it includes part of the "Hull Colour Pages" so they may be happier with it. We also clearly differentiate between the keywords and branding with a different separator.

3. External Links

Other folks have mentioned external links so certainly run your backlink profile through OSE and see if you can locate sites linking back and get that updated.

---

To sum up here Google is not seeing your "colourpages.com" as being the brand so first up make the change to the URL to use "Colour Pages" and separate this from the main part of the page title with the horizontal separator and then do an audit of all old brand mentions and get them claimed and updated so all brand signals are consistent.

To put this into perspective, even your Facebook page uses the old brand so you just need to identify all of these old references and start cleaning them up:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hull-Colour-Pages/104140679621054

No promises here as Google is a fickle mistress at best but these tips would certainly be where I would start with the title changes done first as that is a quick tweak and then work on the brand mentions and get them all updated so you are consistent on and off site.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

References:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624 http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html

[Linda-Vassily]

There is a wikipedia article using the old name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_Colour_Pages

I bet that editing that would go a long way to fixing your problem...

[colourpages]

Thank you LindaLV  - pleased to hear someone else has had this happen to them.

I will check all external links and see what the descriptions are - see if this helps change what appears on Google.

Thanks for your help

[colourpages]

Hi Tuzzell

It's happening to a lot of our URL's but this is the one that i copied the code from http://www.colourpages.com/s/plumbers The terms colourpages.com or Hull are ok because we are a local telephone directory site. It's just the term 'Hull Colour Pages' written exactly like this that we was wanting to change as that was our old name until we changed to colourpages.com.

I just can't seem to find it in the code yet it appears the Google results.

Thanks for your quick response on this one

[Linda-Vassily]

This has happened to me as well, having an old name show up in the search results. Google does not always use what you put in the title tag for the page title if it thinks that something else is more relevant.

In my case, there were still a good number of external links to the site with the old name being the anchor text, which is where Google got it, I assume. I see on your site that variations on "Colour Pages" are used in a number of your links; maybe that's where Google is picking it up.

[Sarbs]

Which particular URL are you looking at?

I have just crawled the site and the Meta titles being reported are the same i see in the HTMl (that i looked at, the crawl is 6.5k pages allready and only half way through). When i searched for your URL in Google got the home page back as you would expect and see Hull mentioned in the title, but it was in you meta title too.