Open Site Explore page titles show as "No Title"

[clifra]

This has been asked many times but I cannot find an answer.

On Open Site Explorer, most URLs I enter show as "No title" which means you have to hover over the URL to see which page is being referred to.

I know you'd want an example, so here's your own site Moz.com

CWrkxZQ

[LisaHunt]

We're finding the URL on another site or page. We don't actually follow it or perform a GET request, we just collect the URL. This is also why you don't see a status code for the page.

If you scroll down in the Moz list, you'll see that the line for http://moz.com/blog/new-data-reveals-67-of-consumers-are-influenced-by-online-reviews includes the page title and a 200 status. That is a page that we have visited as part of the crawl and parsed its source code to find the title and internal links.

With extending the title, we would need to change this across our user interface rather than just on this one page and make sure the change didn't mess with the formatting of this table or any other element using the same code, The length of the URL is determined by pixel size, not number of characters so that it will adapt to screen sizes so changing this element will affect the rest of the table.

You're welcome to use chrome developer tools to change your view, if you'd like. I'd recommend setting the width to around 450 pixels within the a.url element when you're looking at the page. This will allow you to see the full URL in most cases.

As it is possible to download this data as a CSV, this is a lower priority than other changes that we have in progress. We only have a small development team and they are all very busy all the time. I have included your request in our feedback to them and it will be discussed but I can't guarantee that it will be implemented or what kind of timeframe you could expect.

[clifra]

Hi Lisa, you seem to be saying you can retrieve other data such as URL but a simple string of text for a page title is "not in the budget" - "not even Google have that kind of budget"... for page titles? That's precisely what Google does show. The data is useless without it.

1. In OSE "Top Pages", you are not showing ANY page titles that I look for, not even for your own sites home page - please see attached image.

This goes for ANY website I have looked up, no matter how large or small. The data is almost impossible to work with, and many people have asked about this before.

2. You are saying that extending the URL  "would involve a lot of work to change" - well honestly it wouldn't. It is a simple formatting issue.

If you look at my image you'll see al the unused space. You just need to adjust one number in your code, from about 17 (which is what it cuts of at) to about 30.

That will take a developer 5 minutes to do, and will make the data a lot more usable. Please can this be implemented ASAP?

5xWko

[LisaHunt]

Hiya,

Just jumping into this thread for Sam as her day has ended now.

The 'No Title' message you're seeing means that we haven't crawled the page itself as part of our link index collection process. We don't have the crawl budget for every page on every site (even Google don't have that kind of crawl budget) and we use inbound links to calculate the Domain Authority and Page Authority scores, rather than on-page metrics.

We follow a maximum number of links per page and crawl a limited number of pages per site. In most cases, we're looking for links that will take us to other sites so we don't invest in crawling all of the internal pages of a site. We do need to crawl the source code of particular page in order to collect its title.

Does this help to explain what you're seeing?

With the inability to see the full URL for those with more characters, this is unfortunately a limitation of our current user interface. I'll definitely feedback about this for you but this would involve a lot of work to change so I'm not sure that it's something we'll be looking to change in the near future. I'd recommend using the 'Request CSV' option instead so that you can see this information more easily.

[clifra]

Hi Samantha, thank you for the quick reply

If you look at the image I posted you will see that all your pages for Moz.com in Open Site Explorer - including your home page specify "No Title" - there are no titles at all, and this is the case for most domains that I look at in OSE.

Also you can't see the full URL, if the URL is longer than about 20 chars, you have to hover over it to see it, which is a slow process.

I should point out I am talking about the "Top Pages" option within OSE, but that's evident in the image I attached.

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there!

Sam from Moz's Help Team here!:)

So as a basic rundown, the criteria we use for crawling is complicated for our Mozscape Index. Basically, we allot a fixed amount of pages per domain to crawl, which will be a shallow crawl for most sites. Generally, the home page of a site will be the highest ranked page, so it is included over deeper pages in the site, but there are cases where we would choose a very well linked page over the home page if for example an article goes viral and if it has lots of external links that we see, we may choose to crawl it. So for most internal pages, you will see No Data or No Title or even 0 recorded internal links based on the above criteria.

For now the best you can do is keep link building for all or important pages within your domain and not just the home page.

I hope this helps - do let us know if you have any further questions!