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
-
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Google ignoring the Title Tag?
Anybody seen this too? We have a webpage with tiny different title tag and H1. If you search for let's say "Renovatie", you get to see the title tag "De kostprijs van je renovatie". However, when you search with the search term "Wat kost een renovatie", we see the H1 title in the SERP, which is "Wat kost een renovatie". So that's normal when you search a term that's exact the same as the H1 tag, Google ignores the title tag? N.
Technical SEO | | nans0 -
Meta Keywords - Should I define them myself
Hi All, Im sure this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it. SEOQuake etc suggest you should define meta keywords. However I was under the impression that this was not best practice Can anyone confirm what I should do/ is best practice? Cheers Bowey
Technical SEO | | CFCU0 -
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?
Technical SEO | | DanielNordahl1 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Correct Way to Write Meta
OK so this is a really, really basic question. However, I'm seeing some meta written differently to normal and I'm wondering if a) this is correct and b) whether there is any benefit. Normally it's like this: However, I am seeing it written like this is some places: So, the content= and name= are swapped around. I assume the people that did this were thinking that bringing the content forward would mean that Google reads keywords first. Just wondering if anybody knows whether this is good practice or not? Just spiked my interest so apologies for the basic nature of the question!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
SEOMoz is finding jpegs on my site and reporting them as pages with missing meta titles
SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com? SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Will google let me do this
Hi i am working on my site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am adding new sections and was thinking about buying domain names that best describe that section and which people would remember. so for example i am looking at adding a tenerife magazine to my site and would like to know if it would be wise to buy a domain name for example tenerife magazine and then have it directed to the section of my site. would this benefit my site in any way and would google allow this. instead of having in2town.co.uk and then tenerife magazine after it, sorry cannot find the slash as i am on a spanish keyborad at the moment, i would like to have something like tenerifemagazine.co..uk etc If anyone can give me advice on this then that would be great. also can anyone let me know if this is a wise idea or not, to have sub domain names on my main site. i would like to know if i had tenerifemagazine under the in2town domain name would it slow the site down or should i consider building a brand new site just for that and then making people aware that it comes under the in2town umbrella many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848861