Google is not respecting the meta title
-
We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title>
In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an
in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question):
<hgroup>
Pilar Soro
0 Seguidor
Para poder seguir al Profesor, debes de registrarte aquí.Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup>Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now
The point is that google has considered that this particular
is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com".
Two things for which this is even more strange are the following:
-
while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others?
-
the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last?
What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10
on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after.
Provided this situation, we would like to know:
-
is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people?
-
why is it happening? Is it somehow related to
,
<hgroup>and
?
-
why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages?
-
more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow?
Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received!
</hgroup>
-
-
Google has been rewriting page titles for years, even on sites like Apple.com. Sometimes it's to better match user intent with the search, and sometimes it's because they think your title tag is spammy. Barry at Search Engine Roundtable has several pieces on this.
-
Thanks for your answer, David.
I believe they should respect what we, brands and developers, set as the important elements for our users. Although, it's their platform and they'll try to do what's best for theirs... (but they're not always right unfourtunately!).
-
Thank you for your answer, Dan. Hopefully, they'll get better at predicting a title; because in this case it's quite bad chosen.
-
We'll try this solution. It looks like it'll help.
Actually, we tried to get rid of the meta title, but our developer insisted in not removing it for some reason.
-
Some people disagree with my advice on this but from what I've seen, it works 85-90% of the time:
-
Remove name="title" content="Conoce los profesores de Startups | Open IEBS "/> as this is a virtual duplicate of <title></span><span>Conoce los profesores de Startups | Open IEBS </span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title>
-
Add to the header.
I think if you do both these things, next time Google crawls your page, they should use your title.
-
-
I've seen this with our sites too. Title tags, meta descriptions, canonicals, robots.txt, etc. should all be considered just suggestions. Google will look at them and in most cases obey them, but they don't always.
-
Hi Oscar
Sorry not a direct or full answer but just to let you know i have definately seen a few instances of this too i.e. Google coming up with their own titles and replacing the pages actual title tags. If they think they can write a better title than whats in the tag they sometimes do
Cheers
Dan
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
-
Missing Titles?
Hi All, Don't know if anyone can help me but Moz is showing lots of errors for my website for not having title tags for pages when they do? Also when a user refines they search results it is seeing every instance of this as a new page - we have canonical tags across the site to stop this happening yet it is still occurring each time - is there anything else we can do to resolve this problem? It's creating lots of errors for us. Thanks, Laura
Technical SEO | | Citybase0 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
Title in google organic display
The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it? For example: Page Title - unrelated keyword
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
url
link description0 -
How to optimize for different google seach center (google.de, google.ch) ?
We all use Deutsch language and (.com) domains for the sites. I ranked well in google.com ,but not so well in google.de , google.ch , my competitors ranked much better in google.de,google.ch. I checked most of their outbound-links, but get few information. Links from (.DE) domains or links from sites located in German help the rank for special google seach center ? (google.de, google.ch) . Or some other factors i missed? please help.
Technical SEO | | sunvary0 -
Where does Google pull the date stamp?
We're a news media site with content that has been live for a few years. All of a sudden, Google is showing our content (even though no one has touched the file) with a date stamp of '3 days ago'. Even for content that is years old. I checked the date it was last cached, and it doesn't even match. The URLs were last cached on January 16, but the date stamp says '3 days ago.' From where does Google pull the date stamp? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Google Analytics
I usually have Google analytics "real-time" running on one of my monitors, occasionally I glance at the screen to see that are TOP KEYWORDS people are using, lately there have been a lot of long-tail keywords. If I try to copy and paste the queries into google, i can never seem to find us organically for the long-tail searches? Is the real-time feature accurate? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Long Meta Descriptions
I want to create a template for Meta titles, descriptions and keywords on my website for old news and minor pages in order to get some long tail traffic from them. The only template I can think to use for the descriptions takes the first sentence of the news article (which often if above 160 characters). Since these are minor pages, how big of a problem is that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Sitemaps for Google
In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL. Is this true? Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0