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
-
Can Yoast plugin change back old title automatically?
I have a problem with the first page on my website. Im using Wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. After I have changed and updated some information on the page, I also wanted to change and make a better page title. That I understand is to be changed under pages, by scrolling down to the Yoast setting for the specific page. Is that right? However, I have changed the title over and over again, and asked Google to re-index the page. Everything is fine directly after that. But when I check again after 24-48 hours, the page have automatically changed back to the old title? How is that possible? I´ve tried about 5-10 times, but it does the same thing after 24-48 hours every time. Hope you people with great knowledge can help me out here. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | Masse0 -
Why google is not visiting any website from past 10 days
Hi, I observed why Google is not visiting www.SubhaVastu.com from past 10 days, later I checked thoroughly, not only for my site, google stopped visiting all websites from past 10/12 days. Is Google releasing any new updates to the crawler? Any new system is releasing soon. I am expecting Google updated their crawler by this Sunday night and it may visit as usual to all sites from 12-midnight pacific time. Has anyone observed it, any information regarding on this Google step. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | SubhaVaastu0 -
US domain pages showing up in Google UK SERP
Hi, Our website which was predominantly for UK market was setup with a .com extension and only two years ago other domains were added - US (.us) , IE (.ie), EU (.eu) & AU (.com.au) Last year in July, we noticed that few .us domain urls were showing up in UK SERPs and we realized the sitemap for .us site was incorrectly referring to UK (.com) so we corrected that and the .us domain urls stopped appearing in the SERP. Not sure if this actually fixed the issue or was such coincidental. However in last couple of weeks more than 3 .us domain urls are showing for each brand search made on Google UK and sometimes it replaces the .com results all together. I have double checked the PA for US pages, they are far below the UK ones. Has anyone noticed similar behaviour &/or could anyone please help me troubleshoot this issue? Thanks in advance, R
Algorithm Updates | | RaksG0 -
Increase of Directory websites in SERPs
Has anyone noticed a bump for Directory style websites in SERP after the recent Panda/Penguin updates . I am new to SEO but after monitoring one website in particular I have noticed that the site has dropped around 8 positions for location based queries and directory style sites such as yell.com, freeindex.co.uk, thompsonlocal.com all have seemed to moved up ever so slightly even above competior sites, which from memory were all below competior sites in previous search queries . I wonder what your thoughts are on this, or its possible that my site in question has been affected and I need to carry out more work to improve its positions back to its original. Your thoughts are welcome.
Algorithm Updates | | Carden0 -
Title changed in local pack, unchanged in local plus?!
Google seems to have pulled the title from the homepage and put that as the title in the local pack in the SERP for my targeted keyword. The local plus page title remains unchanged. Any way to influence this back to the way it was? The local plus title looks much better in results (even though it's just the brand name (which is the same as the domain name) and not the city + industry).
Algorithm Updates | | Mozzin1 -
Choosing Domain Name
I am trying to choose between two domains:- Lets call them www.exampledeals.com www.examplediscountsforum.com While 1 is shorter than 2, people don't search for 'Example Deals' but they do search for 'Example Discounts' is quite large numbers, therefore 2 containts all the keywords. How much does including the keywords which you are targetting in the domain affect ranking these day?
Algorithm Updates | | easymatt0 -
Why does my Rank Checker result differ to SERPs
Hello SEOmoz members I've got yet another naive question for you. RankChecker is telling me that my client has risen to pg 1 position 7. Whilst SERPs is telling me they are still on position 14. I know that SERPs is variable depending on many factors, but this holds true for separate searches on other computers in various far flung locations. Please give me some insight into what is happening. I'm waiting to open the bubbly! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | catherine-2793880