SERP Meta Dependant Upon Search Query (strange Google bug?)
-
Hi,
I have on-page optimised a client's website
Now take a look at the Title Tag & Meta description of the front page. This is the correct updates I have made -
Title: Practice Management and Financial Consultants to the Health Industry
Description: Award winning Health and Life have been providing accounting, tax and practice management services for Medical, Dental, Allied Health businesses.Now, take a look when the business name is Googled. Notice how the Title Tag switches back to the original, yet the Description Tag is Correct.
Now, take a look when the owner's name is Googled. The Title Tag is now correct, but the description is incorrect.
- Ive set the preferred URL to be the www version
- Ive spent ages in the custom CMS trying to find what could be causing this
- The developer says it's a "Google Thing"
Anyone have any ideas?
-
You might want to also consider using the 'NOODP' and 'NOYDIR' meta tags if you have listings on Yahoo Directory and Dmoz.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264
-
As far as I know there have been no official statement released on this topic from google. But yes google will sometimes change both title and meta description if it "feels" it's more accurate. Why? probably some spam fighting thing. But your guess is almost as good as mine to when it does this. But if you find someone who have some well documented data on the subject do keep me updated
-
The short answer is that yeah, it's a Google thing. Google has been changing titles a lot more lately, and has often tweaked the meta description. Barry has a post on it over at Search Engine Roundtable. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html.
You don't have anything set up wrong in your CMS, it's Google. It's late, so I don't have a longer answer for you, but hopefully this will help keep you from pulling out any more hair while we wait for some more people to chime in.
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
-
Does an Apostrophe affect searches?
Does Google differentiate between keyphrase structures such as Mens Sunglasses & Men**'**s Sunglasses? I.e. does the inclusion/exclusion of an apostrophe make any difference when optimising your main keyword/phrase for a page? Keyword explorer appears to give different results..... I.e. no data for Men's Sunglasses, but data appears for Mens sunglasses. So if I optimise my page to include the apostrophe, will it screw the potential success for that page? Thanks 🙂 Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK1 -
Are similar title tags frowned upon by search engines?
We are a B2B company that is looking to convert to one global portal very soon. It is only then that we will be able to address a lot of the IA SEO issues we are currently facing. However, we are looking to make some quick fixes, namely adding a proper title to the different country homepages. Will having the same title, with only the country modifier swapped out be a good tactic? Since we want a unified title across all country sites, it just makes sense that we don't change it for every single country. For example: Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | Company USA Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | Company Italy Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | France
Technical SEO | | marshseo0 -
Google Sitelinks
Hello, Good afternoon. I am having a site issue with Sitelinks. For some reason when I search Google for the brand I represent "California Olive Ranch" Sitelinks are not being generated. When I search for "Cal Olive Ranch" our site links are being generated. Our domain is Californiaoliveranch.com. Is there a way to tell Google to to change the site links to match our domain and brand name? Is this something that can be done in Google Webmasters? Thank you very much for your help. Adam P
Technical SEO | | apost40 -
Link to Articles for news sites in Google SERPs
I'm trying to figure out why when I search for "international news" or "world news", for example, some sites in the SERPs have links to news articles, while others don't. For "international news", result of Fox News and New York Times have links to articles, while CNN (the top result), only have sitelinks. I would appreciate any theories on why this happens. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | seoFan210 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
Long Meta Descriptions
I want to create a template for Meta titles, descriptions and keywords on my website for old news and minor pages in order to get some long tail traffic from them. The only template I can think to use for the descriptions takes the first sentence of the news article (which often if above 160 characters). Since these are minor pages, how big of a problem is that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate Homepage In Google
Hi Just found through my SEO dashboard, Google has two versions of the same homepage, the root page, plus the index.html page, causing duplicate content from both the pages. what is the best option to ensure google only have 1 version of the homepage listed?
Technical SEO | | rfksolutionsltd0 -
Google SERPs and NoIndex directives.
We have pages that have been added to robots.txt as url patterns in DisAllow. Also, we have the meta noindex tags on the pages themselves. But we are finding the pages in index. I don't think they are higher up in the rankings and they don't have any descriptions, any previews or any cached pages. Why does Google show these pages? Could it be due to internal or external linking?
Technical SEO | | gaganc0