Fetch as Google - removes start words from Meta Title ?? Help!
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Hi all,
I'm experiencing some strange behaviour with Google Webmaster Tools.
I noticed that some of our pages from our ecom site were missing start keywords - I created a template for meta titles that uses Manufacturer - Ref Number - Product Name - Online Shop; all trimmed under 65 chars just in case. To give you an idea, an example meta title looks like:
Weber 522053 - Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online ShopThe strange behaviour is if I do a "Fetch as Google" in GWT, no problem - I can see it pulls the variables and it's ok. So I click submit to index.
Then I do a google site:URL search, to see what it has indexed, and I see the meta description has changed (so I know it's working), but the meta title has been cut so it looks like this:
Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online ShopSo I am confused - why would Google cut off some words at start of meta title? Even after the Fetch as Googlebot looks perfectly ok?
I should point out that this method works perfect on our other pages, which are many hundreds - but it's not working on some pages for some weird reason....
Any ideas?
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If you use the words Weber 522053 in the query, Google is likely to return the title with Weber 522053 in it, even if it doesn't return it that way for a different query, because Google sees that Weber 522053 is important to the querier.
But this does show that Google knows what the intended title is and is shortening it for its own unfathomable Google-ish reasons. (I did notice that Weber 522053 is not visible on the page at all, so possibly that is what makes Google think that it is not important information to display in the serps.)
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Looks ok to me. I did a search for (with the quotes) "Weber 522053 - Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop"
The Title was the full title as you described. I think tried doing a site: search on the the domain and the specific url and again saw the full title.
Google can do some weird stuff tot he title if it thinks that that the title does not accurately reflect the content of the page or its relevance to the search query.
This one is looking ok to me though.
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