Google Generating its Own Page Titles
-
Hi There
I have a question regarding Google generating its own page titles for some of the pages on my website. I know that Google sometimes takes your H1 tag and uses it as a page title, however, can anyone tell me how I can stop this from happening?
Is there a meta tag I can use, for example like the NOODP tag? Or do I have to change my page title?
Thanks
Sadie
-
Great, that could be it, thanks so much for the response,
-
Hi,
If your title tag is too long, or if it contains to many similar words (or repeated words/phrases) Google will use what it thinks is better.
Keep your title tags short and descriptive and don't include too many different keywords 2 at most in my opinion.
Greg
-
Hi Sadie,
How long are your title tags? A new algorithm change that happened over the summer affects the way truncated titles appear in the SEPRs. The highlights: any title that is over 68 characters is no longer cut off and truncated; instead Google can produce a title algorithmically if the title element is too short or too long. If we would like to have control over the title item, that it must be within the new requirements (25ish to 68ish characters) This represents one possible solution, I hope it helped.
Here are the details from the update:
- "Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We'll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one."
http://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html
Cheers!
J
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
-
Best format for E-Commerce Pages in Title Text / Link Text & Markup
Hello Please comment on which you think is best SEO practice for each & any comments on link juice following through. Title text ( on Product Page ) <title>Brandname ProductName</title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
OR
<title>ProductName by Brandname</title> on category page <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">ProductName</a>
<a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">itemprop="brand" href="[brandurl]>BrandName</a> OR <a <span class="html-attribute-name">itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">BrandName ProductName
( Leave Brand Link Out)</a <span> Product Page <a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">ProductName
<a itemprop="brand" href="[brandurl]>BrandName</a itemprop="brand" href="[brandurl]></a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]"> OR <a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]">BrandName ProductName
( Leave Brand Link Out)</a itemprop="name" href="[producturl]"> Thoughts?0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Google now automatically adding (NAME).UK.COM to the end of each page title
We're on a .uk.com subdomain (scientifica.uk.com). Now, at the end of each page title, Google is automatically adding 'Scientifica - UK.COM'. So a lot of our results now appear as [Page title] - Scientifica - UK.COM It looks a bit a mess and I'm worried about our CTR. Can anyone shed some light on this or know how to stop it? Thank you WbCO0BM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Page title inconsistency
Hi folks, Our agency rebranded from New Brand Vision to Decibel Digital a few weeks ago. Most things seem to be fine, 301 redirected the site and our site looks much better however there is one issue. When searching for our responsive site using my Iphone5, the page title appears as "New Brand Vision", even though "New Brand Vision" isn't within the source code. Our page title is <title></span><span data-mce-mark="1">Creative Digital Agency in London | Decibel Digital </span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> which is picked up on Desktop, but not through mobile search when sourcing our responsive site. Does anyone have any suggestions? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tangent0 -
Link Removal Request Sent to Google, Bad Pages Gone from Index But Still Appear in Webmaster Tools
| On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then. The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking? My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday. At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/... If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball. Thanks everyone!! Alan |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How do you transition a keyword rank from a home page to a sub-page on the site?
We're currently ranking #1 for a valuable keyword, but the result on the SERP is our home page. We're creating a new product page focused on this keyword to provide a better user experience and create more relevant content. What is the best way to make a smooth transition to make the product page rank #1 for the keyword instead of the home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buildasign0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0