Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why is Google replacing our title tags with URLs in SERP?
-
Hey guys,
We've noticed that Google is replacing a lot of our title tags with URLs in SERP. As far as we know, this has been happening for the last month or so and we can't seem to figure out why.
I've attached a screenshot for your reference.
What we know:
- depending on the search query, the title tag may or may not be replaced.
- this doesn't seem to have any connection to the relevance of the title tag vs the url.
- results are persistent on desktop and mobile.
- the length of the title tag doesn't seem to correlate with the replacement.
- the replacement is happening at mass, to dozens of pages.
Any ideas as to why this may be happening?
Thanks in advance,
Peter -
Hi Jesse,
Looking through our change log, it seems like our marketing team removed "| Mobify" from all title tags on July 2nd.
They did it because "Mobify" is already in the domain name and is generally mentioned on all pages, so they didn't feel like it was necessary to call it out in the title tags too.
I'm going to add it back and see what happens. Will keep you posted!
Best,
Peter -
Hi again Peter,
That is very interesting and I see your confusion here. I repeated the same test and was given the same results without your brand name in query.. Still when Google is listing the title they are listing your brand name.
It seems to me that they really want your brand name to show in this title. Why? I'm not entirely sure. But that's what they're adding to your title here..
Try shortening your title on that page by a word or two and adding a pipe (|) and "Mobify." Make that your test page for this issue and see what Google does with it when the change populates. I have a funny feeling it might pull your full title at that point.
Most sites out there try to drag their domain/brand into each page title anyway. You can call it "best practice" or just a "funny habit" but I feel like this is what Google is looking for with your site.
I'm incredibly curious, so if you don't mind trying this out and reporting back I would be greatly appreciative.
Thanks and good luck!
-
Thanks for taking your time to answer, Jesse!
Your hypothesis makes total sense, and I was hoping that was the case. Unfortunately, under further inspection, I'm still not sure.
Check this out. We have a page with a title tag "Retail App Engine: The Next Step in Your Mobile Commerce Strategy". I've attached a screenshot of what happens when I search for "Retail App Engine." I don't see why Google would not like our title tag in this case.
If you have any further ideas, I would really appreciate them!
-
If I may chime in, I'm guessing that the search was actually "site:mobify.com mobify" (without quotes). Whether that's right or wrong, however, I know does't answer the question. However, when you do that search, you notice that there are numerous examples of similar occurrences. In each case, the titles are quite long. This situation has been noticed before and there was even a post about it on the Moz blog by Ruth Burr Reedy. In that post, Ruth tracked down a likely possible cause as being that the title provided by the author is too long and because of that Google replaces it with it's best algorithmic alternative.
Peter, try shortening the titles and see if that solves your problem.
-
This was intriguing to me so I dug in a little and I have an initial theory here:
In the example you provided you seem to be searching with your brand name only. "Mobify" is bolded telling me that was a searched keyword.
The title tag for the page in question reads: "25 Top Design Upgrades to Make Your Mobile Revenue Skyrocket [SlideShare]"
My bet is that because you do not have the brand name in your title tag, Google is looking to display something that does carry this particular keyword. In this case it is looking for something with the word "Mobify" in it and finding it in the URL. If you take out the SlideShare portion of your title and replace it with "| Mobify" my guess is this problem will go away.
Look at the other URLs you are having this problem with and tell me if the brand name is missing from it but present in the searched query.
Let me know if this works!
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
-
Favicon not showing in google serps
Hi, I have a website where the favicon is not showing in the google mobile serps. It's appearing the default icon instead (world icon). This is the tag I have place in the head section of the website: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> The size of the favicon is 48x48 and it's appearing correctly in the browser tag. I've checked that the google robot can crawl it and in the server logs I can see requests from the "Google Favicon" user-agent. Has anyone had this same problem? Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dMaLasp0 -
SERP result (URL) doesn't change after a 301
A couple of months ago there was a result in Google for our branded search term which wasn't the 'official' URL, actually the result shown in the SERP was www.mycompany-ip.nl. We've applied a 301 redirect of this URL to the 'official' URL which is a subdomain: department.mycompany.nl. From Google the redirect is obviously working, but up until now, I don't see Google replacing the incorrect URL by the correct URL. I am wondering what to do to make the result correct. André
Technical SEO | | ConclusionDigital0 -
How long does Google takes to re-index title tags?
Hi, We have carried out changes in our website title tags. However, when I search for these pages on Google, I still see the old title tags in the search results. Is there any way to speed this process up? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Google is shortening many of my title tags although they are already quite concise
Hi, Title tags of our website are being truncated by Google even though they can be very short (sometimes < 40 characters) and with very few capital letters. We would like to understand why. Example: Principal component analysis (pca) in abcde - OurBrand shows up as: Principal component analysis (pca) in abcd... - OurBrand where abcde is the name of a very common software (5 characters), and OurBrand is a 6 characters long string (could be used in either lower case or upper case). Even when removing the brackets around pca, truncation still occurs... Any clue why?
Technical SEO | | trigaudias1 -
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
Technical SEO | | IstoresincThe title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck
0 -
When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
We are in the direct mail advertising business: PrintLabelAndMail.com Example: Parent:
Technical SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach
Postcard Direct Mail Children:
Postcard Mailings
Postcard Design
Postcard Samples
Postcard Pricing
Postcard Advantages should "postcard" be repeated in the URL and Page Title? and in this example should each of the 5 children link back directly to the parent or would it be better to "daisy chain" them using each as parent for the next?0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0