Google automatically adding company name to serp titles
-
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I was surprised to see that Google had algorithmically modified my page titles in the search results by adding the company name to the end of the (short) title.
<title>About Us</title> became About Us - Company Name
Interestingly, this wasn't consistent - sometimes it was "company name Limited" and sometimes just "company name.
Anyone else notice this or is this a recent change?
-
Thanks for sharing your experience!
The title tags on the site in question were being automatically generated by the content management system. Due to the particular subject matter some titles tend to be quite long so it was decided to drop the company name which was being automatically appended and is itself rather long.
Unfortunately I don't have total discretion to modify page titles as I see fit, which makes things interesting!
I'm now implementing custom <title>tags so that the company name can be appended where it needs to be, in a consistent manner and drop it from the longer titles that need to take precedence. The company name isn't added to the longer titles.</p> <p>I agree that keeping your title short and specific helps, and adding the company name can boost trust and click-through.</p> <p>I guess we all need to remember to regularly check the titles being displayed in the SERPS and to really make an effort to educate content creators about creating good titles.</p> <p>Thanks.</p></title>
-
Doug,
About 45 days ago I took advise of a user here in the forum to reduce my title tags to one target keyword phrase for each of my city pages (i have about 5000 city pages) and at the time was doing research about adding the "company name" at the end of the title tag if room permitting that it was not to long.
I targeted a lower hanging fruit than my original two keywords reduced my target keyword to one phrase and added our company brand name to the end of the title tags for every page and IMO that was the silver bullet for me along with page content improvements our traffic has increased by 40% and lead conversions have also increased on our site.
And at the time this user told me it was a good idea to add my company name to the title tags and reduce to one target keyword I was researching my competitors and a few of them where already doing this so i figured why not give it a try? It has definitely worked for us and instead of fighting for placement on page two of Google we are now for most searches on page one in the top five results for all of them!
SEO success story for sure using seo moz tools and taking some really good advice from a real expert on this forum.
Oh and also Google use to change my title tags also just as you mentioned...I can no longer find pages where Google is re writing them anymore. So I guess I did something right.
Good luck!
-
Thanks EGOL, I agree it's frustrating, especially as in this case we took the decision to remove the company name from the title...
As well as company names, and URLS/Domain do they use any other "entities?"
-
Google has been doing this for a while.
Sometimes they add your URL to the end of a title tag.
I have some title tags that are short but have my URL at the end. Google is adding my URL on top of that. Looks like this.....
Keywords at Egols.com | egols.com
Sometimes they replace your title tag with words that match the querry.
I object to this because they have overwritten a title tag that with my marketing message such as "free shipping" or a kickass price that pulls in buyers.
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
-
What are top 3 directives to prepare for a Google algorithm update?
Company's site fluctuated in keyword rankings last Friday, due to Unnamed algorithm. Our directives are on-page optimization and continual content generation. What are other directives to take?
Algorithm Updates | | ejcruz0 -
Celebrity Profile On The Side of Google For High Profile Person
Hello! When I google "Justin Timberlake" I see web search results and a sidebar. See image below: http://screencast.com/t/qwYeiFZQRzT How does one get their results to display like this? Is this something that Google creates automatically or is it something the celebrity initiates/creates on their behalf. Does the celebrity have any options to choose from as to what displays on this sidebar? What is this called? I look forward to your response. qwYeiFZQRzT
Algorithm Updates | | InternetRep0 -
Google domain search
Hello all, I'm a newbie to SEO, so you'll have to bear with me. I just started a website LangleyHomeSaerch.com a few months ago and am having trouble ranking with google. When I search "Langley Home Search" with Yahoo or Bing, it comes up on the first page. However when I search it with google it doesn't seem to rank even in the first few hundred pages. The only way I can get a match from google is if I search "Langley HomeSearch" or "LangleyHomeSearch". I know due to google's newer algorithms that there is less importance put on domain name matches, but is this normal, or is there anything I can do to improve it? Thx, Colby Langley, BC
Algorithm Updates | | colbygedak0 -
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br mented in the key word, how can I find out why at and what to do to get back? He fell after he put the google analytic code on all pages of the site, it may have acid? Meu site caiu da 1º para a 5º Pagna do google br em tadas as palavra chaves, como posso descobrir o motivo e oque fazer para voltar ? Ele caiu depois que coloquei o codigo do google analytic em todas as paginas do site, pode ter cido isso ?
Algorithm Updates | | Guedes0 -
If Google doesn’t know we’re hosted in the UK, does that affect our SERPs?
Hi, In November 2011 our eCommerce website dropped from between 3rd and 4th position in the UK SERPs down to 7th and 8th. A year after this happened, we still haven’t moved back up to the original ranking despite all our best efforts and we’re looking for a bit of insight into what could have happened. One of our theories is this, do you think it might be the problem? In October 2011 we moved from a single-site custom built CMS hosted in the UK to a multi-site custom built CMS hosted on a much better server based in the UK. As part of this move we started using CloudFlare to help with security and performance (CloudFlare is a security CDN). Because CloudFlare’s servers are in the US, to the outside world it almost looks like we went from a slow hosting company in the UK to a much quicker hosting company in the US. Could this have affected our rankings? We know that Google takes the server IP address into account as a ranking factor, but as far as we understand it’s because they (rightly) believe that a server closer to the user will perform better. So a UK server will serve up pages quicker to a visitor in the UK than a US server because the data has a shorter distance to travel. However, we’re definitely not experiencing an issue with being recognised as a UK website. We have a .co.uk domain (which is obviously a big indicator) and if you click on “Pages from the UK” in the SERPs we jump up to 3rd place. So Google seems to know we’re a UK site. Is the fact we’re using CloudFlare and hence hiding our real server IP address – is this penalising us in the SERPs? Currently out of the 6 websites above us, 4 are in the US and 2 are in the UK. All of these are massive sites with lots of links, so smaller ranking factors might be more important for us. Obviously the big downside of not using CloudFlare is that our site becomes much less secure and it becomes much slower. Images and some static content is distributed via a local CloudFlare server, which means it should tick Google’s box in terms of providing a quick site for users. CloudFlare say in a blog post that they used to have Google crawl rates and geo-tagging issues in the past when they were just starting out, but in 2010 they started working with “the big search engines” to make sure they treated CloudFlare like a CDN (so special rules that apply to Akamai also apply to CloudFlare). Since they’ve been working with Google, CloudFlare say that their customers will only see a positive SEO impact. So at the moment we’re at a loss about what happened to our ranking. Google say they take IP’s into account for ranking, but by using CloudFlare it looks like we’re in the US. We definitely know we’re not having geo-tagging issues and CloudFlare say they’re working with Google to ensure its customers aren't seeing a negative impact by using CloudFlare, but a niggling part of us still wonders whether it could impact our SEO. Many thanks, James
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0 -
Google dance/over optimized/paranoid?
Hi guys, hope your all OK and thanks in advance for taking a nosey at this. OK where to start - my rankings for the last 12 months have progressively improved every week, usually of the 300 KWs i track the last few months has seen approx 70 up/70down per week, but the improvements usually outweigh the declines. This week I saw a sudden drop though - 35 improvements and 112 declines. The strange thing was though, the improvements came on the more competitive KWs, and the less competitive words I haven't done much or any back linking for dropped. Seems silly me asking this question when I run that through my head ofcouse KWs you don;t work on will drop like flies? It should be plainly obvious those words would drop off but all have been improving on there own slowly over the last 6/7 months. Now if this was a penalty (nothing showing in webmaster tools) I would have expected it to come through on my KWs I have over done the backlinking for, but these are the 1's that improved. So is it just the Google Dance? I normally see some words such as the big 1 we target DJ Equipment go from position 13 - 24 can change hourly sometimes! Could it just be quite a few have dropped all at once and will pop back up this week? Also if anyone could give us any pointers in general on where you think we should be taking our SEO it would be much appreciated. I know we have been a little lazy with our backlinking and could do with some much better/ industry related websites linking to us, and there are title tags/metas on product page that need sorting.. aside these couple of issue's? DJs Only
Algorithm Updates | | allan-chris0 -
Google Page Rank?
We have had a quality website for 12 years now, and it seems no matter how many more links we get and how much new content we add daily, we have stayed at PR3 for the past 10 years or so. Our SEOMoz domain authority is 52. We have over 950,000 pages linking to us from 829 unique root domains. Is this in line with PR3 or should we be approaching PR4 soon? We do daily blog posts with all unique, fresh quality content that has not been published elsewhere. We try to do everything with 'white hat' methods, and we are constantly trying to provide genuine content and high quality products, and customer service. How can we improve our PR and how important is PR today?
Algorithm Updates | | applesofgold0 -
SEO Ranking & Brand Names
I have several situations where one of my sites rank organically in 4th or 5th place for a specific search term relating to a 'big brand' .. I usually fall in behind the brands main website .. commercially this is very good for me. Let me give you an example .. in google.co.uk type in 'thomas cook exchange rates'. I rank position 4 (comparecurrency.co.uk). Position 1-3 are thomas cook's own pages. Naturally. However, my question is .. could I outrank them and how could I initially measure the effort involved in getting to position 1? I noticed Google recently put me into position 1 for this term and then quickly (within a few days) pulled me back down to position 4. Does anyone have any experience of this type of search positioning and have any information that may help me? My gut feel is that I have maybe maxed out the economically viable potential of these keywords and that I should invest my SEO $s into other phrases? Thanks in advance Olly
Algorithm Updates | | ojkingston0