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.
Seeing URL Slugs as search result titles
-
I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing
The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here.
Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.
-
Not a problem with link structure. Doesn't appear to be a problem with code, either, from a glance just now.
The good news? Your title tags work fine for me in Google search results and I see you at #1 ranking after the image pack for "press release examples".
http://i.imgur.com/z2LTwcc.png
IMO this is probably a personalized search result problem that you're seeing, and I would guess it's limited to you unless you've confirmed it with other people outside of your company computers.
Never hurts to resubmit the URL in Search Console, either.
-
Given that our page is 15/15 on those best practices, I don't think link structure is the issue here – unless there's something I'm missing. The URL is fitsmallbusiness.com/press-release-examples/
Great guide, though!
-
You need to rewrite your URL structure,
i reckon you to read the following post from Rend this will help you to understand this issue in a batter way. Hope you will get around of it
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Can OG titles be used as a substitute for Meta titles
We use og (open graph) titles in lieu of meta titles. Is there any downside to using just one. Should we be using both og and meta titles on our page. Appreciate any insight. Himanshu
Technical SEO | | patilhimanshu0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Omitted results
Hello We are facing a loss in ranking and organic traffic from 3 months on our ecommerce website. Mostly we have lost our ranking on our product pages. These pages are gone in the "omitted results" of google. It all started 3 months ago, when we had to face a duplicate content issue due to a technical priblems with our servers: 2 other domains that we own have been pushed online on google, while they shouldn't have. They have created millions of links to our main domain in a few days, and duplicate version / redirection to our main website. We have fixed this a long time ago now. But in GWT we still see that these domains are bringing links to our main ecommerce. It has dowgraded from 36 millions links to 3 millions.... Even if today there is no link ! We have done a lot of optimizations on site like adding specific content to our most important page, rebuilding the navigation, adding microdatas, adding canonical urls on products pages that we found were very similar (we sell very technical products, and we have products that are very similar. Now we have choosen 1 product to put in canonical each time it was necessary) Bt still our products pages don't rank in google. They stay in the "omitted results". Before they were ranking very well on 1st page of google's results. And we have noticed that some adswe put on ads listing websites are now well ranked in the google's results!... Like if the ads were having more authority on the subject than our own webpages... We started to delete some of these ads. But it's not always possible. And 2-3 of them are still online. Any advice to get our most important webpages at the top on the google's results back? Regards
Technical SEO | | Poptafic0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0
