Site titles / descriptions change - Google Algo Change ?
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Hello,
During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this.can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here?
sites:
http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
http://www.gossipbingo.com
http://www.moonbingo.comin the attached examples:
for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions.results for these pages:
moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php -
We saw a lot of this across multiple client websites. Once we saw it on 2, we went and checked all of the others we are optimizing and noticed almost 50% of them changed. Mainly, their Home page Title and Description were modified for various searches related to the client's brand/business name.
Taking note of what Google had changed everything to and cross referencing to the on page content, we edited their Home page Title, Description and also portions of their body content or widget section content. We then resubmitted the sites to Google through Webmasters Tool and have seen most convert to what we want and Google is now displaying.
Try those tactics. Hope this was helpful based on our experiences. - Patrick
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Yes, Google does change the title tag in it's Google search results, according to Google's Webmaster Tools Q&A site:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
Google says that it uses rich snippets of information from your site, as well as a DMOZ, too, for this information.
According to a Yoast article in March of 2013, they write, "So… Basically, Google says: we know better, you can try and write a title we like, but we reserve to do whatever to make people click on your result." ( Why Google won’t display the right page title: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/__)
Another article by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land in April 2013, "When Google Gets It Wrong By Changing the Titles of Web Pages" (http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819) says, "Google doesn’t always use the HTML title tag of a web page, choosing instead to make its own title for a page, if it thinks it can do a better job. Here’s an example of it getting this completely wrong."
So, it appears that Google has decided it's page titles are better than yours…
Options:
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Disallow Google to use DMOZ information in rich snippet information
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Try changing your title tags again, or the content of the pages.
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
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