Why "title missing or empty" when title tag exists?
-
Greetings! On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24).
- "Title missing or empty" was 9,676.
- "Duplicate page content" was 9,678.
Whoa! Content at site has not changed.
I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag.
Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar.
I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place .
In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler. I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages. Titles were found and hash codes were unique. Hmmm.
Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com
Small sample of pages with errors:
- electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html
I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot.
What am I missing please?
Thanks kindly, Loren
-
Hi Ryan,
Thank you for the reply. Yes, content for millions of part numbers is hard to come by for one's own use. It's proprietary for most companies.
When we have more part information, such as a part we have sold, I have a plethora of good information on that part because we've inspected in (photos, detailed visual examination, etc). Example: http://parts.usbid.com/SAA7115HL.html
Yet, there are millions of parts we can sell to people that we haven't actually sold yet. We have hundreds of vendors. We can procure parts from other sources for our customers (as well as out of our own inventory). Since we offer hard-to-find parts, businesses come to us when they cannot find it via other channels.
How do they search? They dump the number in Google and look for reputable sites that can provide a quote on that part (qty, manufacturer, etc).
So, many times all I have is the part number and a list of those on the page **is not great content. So admitted. ** It's the best I have to generate a lead.
If you have strong thoughts on SEO attention and content for the arena in which we play, I'm all ears. Like I mentioned to Cyrus, I am looking to work with talented people to improve content and SEO. Whom do you recommend?
Kindly, Loren
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. On Rogerbot's challenge crawling our site and vice-versa, is there a data dump or other clues on what went wrong? You got me halfway there identifying a crawl problem. The next step is for me to understand/reproduce (and fix) the black box to which you refer.
Care to use your super powers to shine a bit more light in the box for me?
Title tags are too long. I agree and will change.
Also, you are perceptive and spot-on for the scalability of this content. When I have many more attributes than part number (such as manufacturer, data code, description, photos, etc) we have those on "single part pages." Those pages are more descriptive and "content worthy."
The problem is that we have only so much content for part information. If I could buy it, believe me, I'd purchase, enhance and publish that information. (Manufacturer datasheets already exist and are for engineers more than our audience).
Our business is to provide hard-to-find parts. So, we need to show up in searches when purchasers dump a manufacturer part number into a search engine (yep, when it's hard to find, that's what businesses do to search).
So, I need to scale the best I can with content of this type. We experiment quite a bit. If you have ideas for me or know of someone to engage for a thoughtful experiment, I am willing to engage talent to assist.
Again, thank you. I hope you'll give me a bit more insight into an error dump (a few lines maybe) so I can see what's up. I will validate and clean up HTML today.
Any follow-up thoughts?
Kindly, Loren
-
Hi Loren,
I took a peek at your website, and checked some things behind the scenes using my super-awesome administrative powers here at SEOmoz. It looks like one of two things happened.
- Rogerbot encountered an error when crawling your site
- Your site had trouble with rogerbot.
In either case, you probably want to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org), especially if the problem persist in the next crawl report.
On another note..
Those extra-long title tags might cause some crawlers a little confusion. I'm not saying they're bad for you, but I doubt they are helping you much from a search engine point of view. Undoubtedly, I'd say with near certainty that Google is not indexing the entirety of your title tags. Paginated lists like this are tough to get indexed properly. If folks are actually searching for these obscure part numbers, perhaps this is the only way to scale it. That said, I would encourage you to experiment.
-
Hi Loren.
I took a look at the pages you shared. There is definitely a problem with the title. The Title field is supposed to have a maximum of 70 characters. Anything beyond that is cut off. I've seen some titles go a bit past that but your first page has a title with over 500 characters, and the second page you list has over 600 characters.
Another problem is the title's purpose is to let users and search engines understand the topic of the page. All of your titles begin with "Electronic Parts". Duplicating the same term at the beginning of all your titles is very bad for SEO.
Each page requires a unique, relevant, readable title under 70 characters.
Additionally, the page content is really poor. These are not indexable pages. Your pages all have the identical header, footer and sidebar which is understandable. Then you offer the exact same form at the top. After there is just a very long list of part numbers. There is no readable text, no sentences, no paragraphs, nothing to index except hundreds of part numbers.
Your site requires major SEO attention if you wish to be listed in search engines.
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
-
How handle pages with "read more" text query strings?
My site has hundreds of keyword content landing pages that contain one or two sections of "read more" text that work by calling the page and changing a ChangeReadMore variable. This causes the page to currently get indexed 5 times (see examples below plus two more with anchor tag set to #sectionReadMore2 This causes Google to include the first version of the page which is the canonical version and exclude the other 4 versions of the page. Google search console says my site has 4.93K valid pages and 13.8K excluded pages. My questions are: 1. Does having a lot of excluded pages which are all copies of included pages hurt my domain authority or otherwise hurt my SEO efforts? 2. Should I add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the read more link? If I do this will Google reduce the number of excluded pages? 3. Should I instead add logic so the canonical tag displays the exact URL each time the page re-displays in another readmore mode? I assume this would increase my "included pages" and decrease the number of "excluded pages". Would this somehow help my SEO efforts? EXAMPLE LINKS https://www.tpxonline.com/Marketplace/Used-AB-Dick-Presses-For-Sale.asp https://www.tpxonline.com/Marketplace/Used-AB-Dick-Presses-For-Sale.asp?ChangeReadMore=More#sectionReadMore1 https://www.tpxonline.com/Marketplace/Used-AB-Dick-Presses-For-Sale.asp?ChangeReadMore=Less#sectionReadMore1
Technical SEO | | DougHartline0 -
"nofollow" vs. "no follow"
Does anyone know if it is problematic to have a space between the "no" and the "follow"? I just discovered our CMS has been inserting a space and am trying to understand if it the reason why something that we were trying to keep from being indexed has become indexed.
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
Technical SEO | | kirupa
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one:0 -
Combining variants of "last modified", cache-duration etc
Hiya, As you know, you can specify the date of the last change of a document in various places, for example the sitemap, the http-header, ETag and also add an "expected" change, for example Cache-Duration via header/htaccess (or even the changefreq in the sitemap). Is it advisable or rather detrimental to use multiple variants that essentially tell browser/search engines the same thing? I.e. should I send a lastmod header AND ETag AND maybe something else? Should I send a cache duration at all if I send a lastmod? (Assume that I can keep them correct and consistent as the data for each will come from the very same place.) Also: Are there any clear recommendations on what change-indicating method should be used? Thanks for your answers! Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
How to use rel="alternate" properly for mobile directory.
Hey everyone, For the URL - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm - I have the following tags in the header: rel="canonical" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm" /> rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?id=37564" /> Yes Google WMT is reading these as duplicate pages with duplicate titles, meta descriptions etc. How can I fix this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
"Standout" tag and "Original content" tags - what's the latest?
In November 2010 Google introduced the "standout tag" http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283 I can't find any articles/blog posts/etc in google after that date, but its use was suggested in a google forum today to help with original content issues. Has anyone used them? Does anyone know what's the latest with them? Are they worth trying for SEO? Is there a possible SEO penalty for using them? Thanks, Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Tags - Should i add description for every tag ?
Hi 🙂 Should i add description for every tag in wordpress and i am using Yoast WordPress SEO and there is also option to add SEO title for tags , should i add also titles for tags ? and how should look title for tag, can you give me example from my blog : http://www.dota2club.com thank you !!!!
Technical SEO | | wolfinjo0 -
One H1 tag Dead Long Live multiple H1 tags?
Good afternoon from 9 degrees C mostly cloudy Wetherby UK, Ive been holding on to the mantra of one h1 tag per page but a developer has challenged me on this by stating you can have multiple h1 tags on the condition the page is HTML 5 & each h1 tag is within its own section or article tag. So the question is do i need to change my tune? Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0