Google stripping down Page Titles
-
When viewing pages indexed by Google, I've noticed the Page Titles have be down stripped as follows:
Actual Page Title: CITY Keyword - STATE keyword
Google Indexed Page Title: 1 - Domain.comNone of the keywords in the actual PAGE TITLE are present; all words have been replaced with a random digit -domain.com. We launched a new version of the site several months back.. Any Idea on what can be causing this?
-
There are many reasons why Google do this, but it may be that they think you are keyword stuffing.
-
From what I've seen, Google does what they want. You can try to influence this with noodp, noydir tags but they may not follow that either. Also, make your title
city keyword | state keyword and see if that helps. Having a dash basically makes "one sentence" and having the pipe has (for us) seemed to split it in two - so you aren't having the same keyword twice but once, two times.
-
Hi,
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.
More on this:
https://yoast.com/google-page-title/
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/google-changing-title-tags
Hope this helps!
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
-
Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded in Google webmaster tools.
In Google Webmaster Tools, I have a coverage issue. I am getting this error message: Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded. It gives the below blog post page as an example. Any idea how to resolve? At one time, I was using handl utm grabber, but the plugin is deactivated on my website. https://www.savacations.com/turrialba-costa-ricas-garden-city/?utm_source=deleted&utm_medium=deleted&utm_term=deleted&utm_content=deleted&utm_campaign=deleted&gclid=deleted5.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alancito0 -
How can another country domain appear in a page title?
I have run into something i have never seen before. A friend has a website with two country domains, so page titles for the homepages of both websites look like this: Rent your care here | carrentals.de Rent your car here | carrentals.co.uk The thing is, both are perfectly well set-up in Yoast. Yet when googling, the different URL's both appear like this: Rent your car here | carrentals.co.uk How could this happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boostability0 -
Blog posts and 3rd hierarchy pages weigh same as per Google?
Our blogs.website.com has been a sub-directory since 2 years as website.com/blog. Now we have blog posts with URLs website.com/blog/blog-post-1. This blog is located at different place technically, away from website. Now my doubt is whether the blog-posts have equal weightage at Google just like other 3rd hierarchy level pages of website like website.com/page1/topic2. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Can we talk a bit more about cannibalisation? Will Google pick one page and disregard others.
Hi all. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently. Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'. Take a look here. Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc. Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'. **And our home page outranks it for this search term. **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails. Question: Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page? And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'? (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon) But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Also, what would you do in this scenario? Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page? Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Hope that makes sense. Do shout if not. Thanks in advance. Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6630 -
Pages getting into Google Index, blocked by Robots.txt??
Hi all, So yesterday we set up to Remove URL's that got into the Google index that were not supposed to be there, due to faceted navigation... We searched for the URL's by using this in Google Search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:price=
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:artists= So it brings up a list of "duplicate" pages, and they have the usual: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." So we removed them all, and google removed them all, every single one. This morning I do a check, and I find that more are creeping in - If i take one of the suspecting dupes to the Robots.txt tester, Google tells me it's Blocked. - and yet it's appearing in their index?? I'm confused as to why a path that is blocked is able to get into the index?? I'm thinking of lifting the Robots block so that Google can see that these pages also have a Meta NOINDEX,FOLLOW tag on - but surely that will waste my crawl budget on unnecessary pages? Any ideas? thanks.0 -
How would Google reach internal pages on Zales with Lazy Load?
Hi, I encountered the following page on Zales:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
http://engagementring.theprestigediamondcollection.com/NewEngagementRing/NewEring.aspx As you scroll down more items pop up (the well known Pinterest style).
Would Google bot be able to enter the product pages? I don't assume the bot "scrolls"... Thanks0 -
Page loads fine for users but returns a 404 for Google & Moz
I have an e-commerce website that is built using Wordpress and the WP E-commerce plug-in, the products have always worked fine and the pages when you view them in a browser work fine and people can purchase the products with no problems. However in the Google merchant feed and in the Moz crawl diagnostics certain product pages are returning a 404 error message and I can't work out why, especially as the pages load fine in the browser. I had a look at the page headers and can see when the page does load the initial request does return a 404 error message, then every other request goes through and loads fine. Can anyone help me as to why this is happening? A link to the product I have been using to test is: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ Here is a part of the header dump that I did: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leapSEO
GET /organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ HTTP/1.1
Host: earthkindoriginals.co.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: __utma=159840937.1804930013.1369831087.1373619597.1373622660.4; __utmz=159840937.1369831087.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); wp-settings-1=imgsize%3Dmedium%26hidetb%3D1%26editor%3Dhtml%26urlbutton%3Dnone%26mfold%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26ed_size%3D160%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1370438004; __utmb=159840937.3.10.1373622660; PHPSESSID=e6f3b379d54c1471a8c662bf52c24543; __utmc=159840937
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:58:33 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
X-Pingback: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 6653
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-80 -
Charity project for local women's shelter - need help: will Google notice if you alter the document title with Javascript after the page loads?
I am doing some pro-bono work with a local shelter for female victims of domestic abuse. I am trying to help visitors to the site cover their tracks by employing a document.title change when the page loads using JavaScript. This shelter receives a lot of traffic from Google. I worry that the Google bots will see this javascript change and somehow penalize this site or modify the title in the SERPs. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of javascript maneuver? All help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jkonowitch0