Page Title Displaying differently on Google
-
Hi i am wondering why page title is display differently on google search. The combination of words that are being displayed on google are not on the page and the page title is simply "Camera Filters", however the page is showing as "our range of Camera Filters" (with the same capitalisation).
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0cf4r09y27
I have optimised the age as best i can so it removes the OUR RANGE OF preface, however no luck.
Any info would be appreciated.
Cheers
-
I've actually run into 1) a lot. When you search for site: you get the raw index data, not what Google will show in live SERPs. This is a problem for rich snippet text as well; when Google can read your rich snippets but chooses not to show your mark ups, the mark ups will show up in site: but not in any other searches.
I was able to find the "our range" version when I was searching just now, so this is still a problem, I'm afraid. I've given you my opinion in more detail below.
-
Hi Andrew,
Wow, this is an interesting find! Not something I've heard of before.
Like others have said, Google has recently started to take it upon themselves to rewrite your page title if they feel it's not descriptive enough. Linda shared a link that went over their official guidelines above.
Mmy theory is that "Camera Filters - Digital Camera Gear" isn't descriptive enough to Google (possibly because your brand name looks like a product category, which it may not like in the page title), so it's searching your site for more information about camera filters. I wasn't able to do a full crawl of your site, but I was able to find a few links to the Camera Filters page in Google's index:
- 8% OFF ALL Camera Filters during the 8th Month (which is now redirecting home, but Google still has it in its index): "Click here for our range of Camera Filters."
- Camera Filters - Which one... (which Google also has indexed separately in the blog pagination 2 - Digital Camera Gear "To view our range of filters, please click HERE."
My theory is that Google has an algorithm that identifies low quality page titles and tries to replace them cleverly, but it doesn't have enough information to do that well in your case. To test this out, try writing a more robust <title>like:</p> <p><strong>Camera Filters - UV, Polarisers & More - Digital Camera Gear</strong></p> <p>My guess is, Google will like this better and stick with your page title.</p> <p>Let us know how this goes!</p> <p>Kristina</p></title>
-
Thanks Mark. Turns out it was "user error" All appears fine in an anonymous search.
Thanks for bring up point 2. Is this really a issue as i would have assumed in google webmaster, google would have been "notified" about this. I have done a quick search on this though and cant seem to find to much info. Any idea on how to implement on a Joomla site?
Cheers
Andrew
-
Two things:
-
if you search for "site:digitalcameragear.com.au", you'll see the title as you entered it for the camera filters page. Not sure why it's showing up differently for your search. At first, I thought it was taking some content from the page, but the word "range" doesn't appear on the page anywhere. Very strange. As others said, perhaps in an incognito window it shows up normally.
-
Totally unrelated: the site seems to have issues with duplicate content on http://www.digitalcameragear.com.au/ and http://digitalcameragear.com.au/ (without www). There are no canonical tags, so you should either add canonical tags or redirect one version to the corresponding version across the site.
-
-
Usually when Google updates the title on its own it’s because the title is not optimized or too general against the desired query. The best idea is to redevelop your title and see if it works out for you!
Hope this helps!
-
Both Chrome and Firefox have incognito/private windows as a menu choice. A global way to do non-personalized search is to append ?pws=0 after the Google query URL. (And definitely be sure you are not logged in to your browser.)
-
Hi Linda the search was Camera Filters
I am unsure how do do an anonymous search???
-
What Google will show in the search results is partly based on what the person searched for. What was your search? (I see, based on the bolding, that it included camera and filters--were there any other terms?)
Also, what happens if you do an anonymous search? If you are logged in, you might be seeing things based on your history.
Here is a link with information from Google that might help.
-
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I am not 100% convinced about this as Camera Filters would be the most relevant page title, not "our range of Camera Filters" with "our" not being capitalised either.
-
I do remember that Matt cuts said something about using criteria to change a web page title. When your title doesn't meet that criteria, Google will change your title.
Here're most important criterias:
- Short enough.
- Relevant to the query.
- describe what in the page and the site.
So, Google finds it more relevant to change your title.
Eslam
-
Thanks for looking.
Sorry, i dont understand.... If the page title is " Camera Filters - Digital Camera Gear"
Then why is google displaying "our range of Camera Filters"??
It should be displaying the title tag.
-
Hey Andrew,
I checked it for you and here's the details,
You page title is: Camera Filters - Digital Camera Gear. (In [title] tag)
You top heading is: Camera Filters .(in [h1] tag)
Simply Google shows your page title, not your top heading. So, you need to change your title tag.
Wish this help,
Eslam
-
Hi, the page has never been named as google is showing it at the moment. It has always just been "Camera Filters"
-
Google download a version of your page to show it in search results with a link to your page, and they update this version with time, perhaps the title of the page is old and Google didn't update it yet.
Eslam
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 displaying "Items 1-9" before the description in the Search Results
We see our pages coming up in Google with the category page/product numbers in front of our descriptions. For example: Items 1 - 24 of 86 (and than the descriptions follows). Our website is magento based. Is there a fix for this that anyone knows of? Is there method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description?
Technical SEO | | DutchG0 -
Is this okay with google if i can access my sub categories from two different path?
My website is url is abcd.com. One of my category url is abcd.com/mobile.aspx. Which contains 5 sub categories :- samung Mobile 2) Nokia Mobile 3) Sony Mobile 4) HTC Mobile 5) Blackberry Mobile Now if i go in to HTC Mobile sub categories i.e. abcd.com/htcmobile.aspx here i will see all the product related to HTC Mobile. But at below of all product i will find all sub categories that is samsung mobile, nokia mobile, sony mobile and blackberry mobile. So i want to task is this okay? Google will not count these categories as duplicate that is i can access all 4 categories i.e. samsung, nokia, sony and blackberry from here 1) abcd.com/mobile.aspx and 2) abcd.com/htcmobile.aspx Thanks! Dev
Technical SEO | | devdan0 -
I am looking for the best post and page title template
There seems to be a few schools of thought as to how the title templates in the yoast plugin. currently mine are set with the default templates posts title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) page title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) What are the best options here for proper SEO. I am learning as much as i can but i have searched for a concrete answer here on the net, but found many different responses. What do you all think? What is my best option?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
How do I influence what page on my site google shows for specific search phrases?
Hi People, My client has a site www.activeadventures.com. They provide adventure tours of New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. These destinations are split into 3 folders in the site (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand, activeadventures.com/south-america etc....). The actual root folder of the site is generic information for all of the destinations whilst the destination specific folders are specific in their information for the destination in question. The Problem: If you search for say "Active New Zealand" or "Adventure Tours South America" our result that comes up is the activeadventures.com homepage rather than the destination folder homepage (eg: We would want activeadventures.com/new-zealand to be the landing page for people searching for "active new zealand"). Are there any ways in influence google as to what page on our site it chooses to serve up? Many thanks in advance. Conrad
Technical SEO | | activenz0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Differing numbers of pages indexed with and without the trailing slash
I noticed today that a site: query in Google (UK) for a certain domain I'm looking at returns different numbers depending on whether or not the trailing slash is added at the end. With the trailing slash the numbers are significantly different. This is a domain with a few duplicate content issues. It seems very rare but I've managed to replicate it for a couple of other well known domains, so this is the phenomenon I'm referring to: site:travelsupermarket.com - 16'300 results
Technical SEO | | ianmcintosh
site:travelsupermarket.com/ - 45'500 results site:guardian.co.uk - 120'000'000 results
site:guardian.co.uk/ - 121'000'000 results For the particular domain I'm looking at the numbers are 19'000 without the trailing slash and 800'000 with it! As mentioned, there are a few duplicate content issues at the moment that I'm trying to tidy up, but how should I interpret this? Has anyone seen this before and can advise what it could indicate? Thanks in advance for any answers.0 -
Two different canonical tags on one page
Due to an error, some of my pages now have two canonical tags on them. One is correct and the other goes to a nonsense URL (404 page). I know I should ideally remove the incorrect ones, but it's a big manual job. Are they doing any harm? Can I just leave them there and let Google figure it out? The correct ones are higher up in the code. Will this make a difference? Any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Some site pages are removed from Google Index
Hello, Some pages of my clients website are removed from Google Index. We were in top 10 position for some keywords but now I cannot find those pages neither in top 1000. Any idea what to do in order to get these pages back? thank you
Technical SEO | | besartbajrami0