Google website-links changing back and fourth
-
Thought I might ask you guys if you have ever seen anything similar, 'cause I sure haven't.
I have a client who stumbled across a problem with his website links. Google change them back and fourth. one day one of the links will be called "iPhone 4 accessories" and some weeks pass and then it changes to " 4 accessories". Weeks pass again and then the iphone is back.
First I thought to myself that Google might have expanded the AdWords filter to include website-links.. But then I remembered that they were ordered by the EU courts to size that practice.. so that can't be it. Plus allot of his competition doesn't seem to have the same problem.
I have checked everything, the links, title tags, page titles exc.. and I acn't realt find any reason why this should be happening to him and I must admit I have never seen anything similar.
Any hints and pointers would be most welcome
-
Honestly no.. and noone seems to know the answer (I ofcause havent tried to ask google). I have tried everyone from Search Engine Land, SEOmoz, webmaster forums, googles webmaster forums, other experts within the industry.. and noone seems to have any idea or have ever experienced it for that matter. What I wound up doing was:
1. make a new landing page for the subject and did a ton of link building paying close mind to the anvhor texts as always.
2. make a 301 redirect to the new page.
After some months the problem stopped.. I have however never found the reason for the problem. And no one seems to know the answer
-
Hi! Did you ever figure out why this was happening, or find a way to stop Google from doing this? I'm following up on older, unanswered questions in Q&A and wondering how this turned out. Thanks!
-
Hi LameMule,
Those site links are hard to control and really it's an automated process that Google uses to generate the title for those links. My suggestion is to make sure that all your internal linking is set the way you want it to display in your site link. My guess is that Google is coming across different versions of anchor text pointing internally to your page and then changing it based on that.
Casey
-
are you sure we are talking about the same thing here? I'm not talking about adwords, while you seem to be
Check out my screenys in the iNet thread below
-
Here is a before and after image:
http://damule.dk/Screenys/before.png
http://damule.dk/Screenys/after.png
These are the two states that Google changes between. one month it's correct next month it's all wrong and visa versa.
-
when you setup a keyword add the exact match of it. read the google tutorial abbout setting kewords
-
Not sure I get what you mean, could I persuade you to elaborate a tat?
-
I might actually have a screeny back at the office, but i am out of town for the weekend, but I'll see if I can conjure one up when I get back to the office Monday
-
Have you got a screenshot of this?
I have heard from others where Google has changed results in the SERP's myself
-
iPhone 4 accessories, if you want to keep how it is you must choose and the exact match to keyword there are 3 types
iPhone 4 accessories
"iPhone 4 accessories"
[iPhone 4 accessories]
Try this and it will not change anymore
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
-
Should I nofollow/noindex the outgoing links in a news aggregator website?
We have a news aggregator site that has 2 types of pages: First Type:
Technical SEO | | undaranfahujakia
Category pages like economic, sports or political news and we intend to do SEO on these category pages to get organic traffic. These pages have pagination and show the latest and most viewed news on the corresponding category. Second Type:
News headlines from other sites are displayed on the category pages. The user will be directed to that news page on the main site by clicking on a link. These links are outgoing links and we redirect them by JavaScript (not 301).
In fact these are our websites articles that just have titles (linked to destination) and meta descriptions (reads from news RSS). Question:
Should we have to nofollow/noindex the second type of links? In fact, since the crawl budget of websites is limited, isn't it better to spend this budget on the pages we have invested in (first type)?0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Reverify website
Hello, I want to disavow some really dodgy links and although the website is verifed since we see a meta tag in the source code, we no longer have the login details for the email address used to verify it so can't access the tools console. So how do I upload a disavow file (the links i got were from Ahref and Moz analysis)? Should I reverify the website using a new email address and upload a new meta tag? Is there a problem with doing this? Sorry if this is obvious!
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
HUGE decrease in links since website redesign
We recently added several new pages pages to our website. These new pages were constructed on a dev site, and then pushed live. Since the new site has gone live I have seen a huge decline in links. My external followed links have dropped from 3000 to 500 and my total website links have fallen from 35,000 to 4,500. I have done some research, and I think there is a server side issue. Where multiple versions of my URL may be running. The majority of the links built were pointing to the homepage. That being said I do not have access to our in-house dev person this week, so I am trying to identify the problem myself. I have used screaming frog to crawl my site and did not see any errors which stand out. I realize I probably need to use 301 redirects to solve this problem, I just need some guidance on how to identify what I need to 301 redirect. Second question. If I move a landing page out of the global navigation but it can still be reached through other pages on the website , will this cause issues?
Technical SEO | | GladdySEO0 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
I cannot find a way to implement to the 2 Link method as shown in this post: http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218
Did Google stop offering the 2 link method of verification for Authorship? See this post below: http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218 And see this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget In both articles the authors talk about how to set up Authorship snippets for posts on blogs where they have no bio page and no email verification just by linking directly from the content to their Google+ profile and then by linking the from the the Google+ profile page (in the Contributor to section) to the blog home page. But this does not work no matter how many ways I trie it. Did Google stop offering this method?
Technical SEO | | jeff.interactive0 -
Would moving a large part of our website onto a separate website be SEO suicide?
Hello, Our website currently has what I would call educational and sales pages - which sells our services and also a techy section for the developer community. The developer pages on the website have some of the highest authority pages that we have and equates for about 50% of the content. It has been proposed to move the developer pages onto their own domain - away from the main website. Now, would this crush a lot of the SEO benefit that we have on our main site? Does anyone know of a workable solution that would help retain the SEO. Would linking to our main site from the developer site help? It would be great to hear what people think, Thanks,
Technical SEO | | esendex0