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.
Home Page Title - Google Overriding my Title Tag
-
Hi,
We have noticed our home page title tag has now been replaced by our brand name (by Google I'm assuming).
We have also noted that the page is dropping off SERPS for our main keywords, I suspect they are related but ofc I cant be sure. I know the recent Google update has impacted titles but I wasn't sure if it would apply here.
Has anyone any advice on this and/or having the same issue?
We normally rank well for grass seed (UK search) https://thegrasspeople.com/
I also noticed some strange mark up in our source code which seems to have been left behind by Sketch - we are getting this removed.
<title>Combined Shape</title> <desc>Created with Sketch.</desc>Chris
-
There seems to be a misunderstanding as the Page Title is matching the title tag of the code. Kindly check once again.

-
I have the same issue with my site - South West Film. The page title is Video Production Company Bristol - South West Film but Google replaces it with South West Film: Video Production Company Bristol. Not sure if it is hurting my rankings.
-
I have the same issue with my Joomla site South West Film which has the title tag as Video Production Company Bristol - South West Film but Google replaces it with South West Film: Video Production Company Bristol. Not sure if it is hurting my ranking.
-
Thanks for the advice.
-
Hey @chris_mc
We all had noticed a similar issue but this is not something new. Just like Google decides what to show for a meta description tag from the page on a SEPR, similarly, it can even choose the most appropriate title to display on SERPs based on your page content.
I would recommend adding quality content (About 600 to 800 words) which signals the crawlers what the page is about and include your primary and secondary keywords in the Page Title, Meta Description, Image Alt Tags, Headers, Content & Page URL and other important on-page avenues if feasible.
These will provide great signals to the crawler and Googlebot will know and showcase the appropriate Page Title.
-
@piotrstarzynski Thanks for the reply and link - we've asked the devs the same question, they are workling on the changes - they are just a little slow..
-
@chris_mc Title looks exactly the same as in code.

You have some unnecessary/garbage things in code. For example why do you need title meta?

Take a look here: developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/special-tags?hl=en
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 having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ1 -
Changing title tags - any potential issues?
Hello all, I am planning to change the title tags throughout a site and am vaguely aware (perhaps wrongly!) that changing title tags across a site is a risk factor - can be a spam flag if changes (to a specific title tag) are implemented too regularly, for example. Would you change title tags across a site in one go, or implement changes gradually - to avoid any risk of upsetting Google. Do you have any insights/tips on the implementation of title tag changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How do you check the google cache for hashbang pages?
So we use http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x.com/#!/hashbangpage to check what googlebot has cached but when we try to use this method for hashbang pages, we get the x.com's cache... not x.com/#!/hashbangpage That actually makes sense because the hashbang is part of the homepage in that case so I get why the cache returns back the homepage. My question is - how can you actually look up the cache for hashbang page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Exact match Title and H1 tags, and over optimization
Hi Mozzers - was just wondering whether matching H1 and Title tags are still OK, or whether there's an over optimization risk if they exact match?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990