Does Google think My main keyword is my Company name due to over use in anchor text?
-
OK, i have recently noticed google is adding a keyword to my titles... I have attached an image which shows the results from a google site:mywebsite search...
8 out of the 10 results on the screen shot clearly have the keyword ( - CCTV Cameras) added to the end of the title.
Now a lot of those pages are support pages i.e "Help & Support", "returns" etc etc.. nothing really to do with cctv cameras.
The only thing i can think of, is the most common anchor text used on backlinks to my website (according to siteexplorer) is the keyword cctv cameras... (i am currently working on removing a load of the backlinks to my site due to what i think is some kind of google penalty as the anchor text is all keywords etc...)
But it seems strange if google has started to discount these backlinks, that it then uses that keyword to add to my titles - unless of course, google thinks that it is my brand name...
Any body have any thoughts on this?
-
For what it's worth, I'm agreeing with Jeremy. Having accidentally done this to myself and spent more than a few hours trying to figure out why all my title tags were messed up... It turned out to be a WP plugin that had a template for a sitewide override (or something to that effect) where there were a bunch of %%something%%, %%date%%, %%blah-blah%% that I must have filled in at some point not realizing what I was doing.
Took them out... and everything went back to normal.
My screen looked extremely similar to yours.
-
Jeremy brings up a good point. Perhaps you changed title tags on your site through a sitewide SEO tool, but Google had indexed them before you made changes. If that's the case, you may just need to wait for Google to crawl your site again and update the title tags.
If you have webmaster tools, you might check to see the last date Google crawled the site.
-
Hi Guys, i am new to Moz and the Q&A, so please go easy
I just wanted to ask what cms you are running and have you installed any SEO plugins, I know that on wordpress sites I run infinite SEO and it allows me to override any on page meta tags and descriptions.
This would explain why you have the - CCTV Cameras on every page as opposed to the true key words
-
My assumption would be yes, they think your company name is CCTV Cameras. I have seen Google add the company name to sites on other sites, but the only thing that is different is I thought they were making it appear more like this - CCTV Camera: [Rest of Title Tag]
Refer to Matt Cutts' blog for what I'm talking about, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/, and notice his title tags.
-
they according to your web sites source records I can see your title tag and your description. I did make one mistake there is a or a directory dmoz that can dictate what Google puts in your description however I don't believe that this is what is happening because the description matches what is being shown. Just by going to your website and clicking to source content I can see this you have to fix what's in <title>CCTV Cameras & CCTV Systems for Home or Business Security</title>
if you have already changed it it could be that your web cache needs to be cleared.
| http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> |
| | <title></span>CCTV Cameras & CCTV Systems for Home or Business Security<span class="webkit-html-tag"></title> |
| | name="verify-v1" content="XzrVCq0ehWolKFbou5JRNQcCDm49JVzVQdilTU6+jGg=" /> |
| | name="msvalidate.01" content="5A317417D2582794E61B7F20CF3DD1E3" /> |
| | name="keywords" content="cctv, cctv camera kits, cctv security systems"/> |
| | name="description" content="Buy CCTV Systems for home or business Security. Order complete Kits or CCTV Cameras, CCTV Recorders and build your own System with Professional advice."/> |
| | | -
Hi Thomas,
But that is just it... none of the pages in that photo have the words "- CCTV Cameras" in the title tag... Google has put that word into the title only on the search results page...
They are NOT in the html...
-
the reason Google has listed your site in the manner shown inside the photograph (which I'm very happy you did provide it's always a very good thing.)
Is not because there adding keywords to your site Google does not add or subtract keywords from your website.
Whomever designed the site or use the current administrator has the power to describe a webpage and name a webpage.
So your example.com
name could be whatever you like it to be. So you can re-name your pages if you do not want
"( - CCTV Cameras)" in the title I would recommend you move it. It has nothing to do an anchor text penalties.
If you're entire link index shows numerous different keywords like camera brands different things other than your website URL or name Google logically can figure out that that is not natural and penalize you for. Have you received a penalty from Google?
Have you noticed a large decrease in traffic?
Please let me know if I can be of more assistance. Google does not change but remember your web sight structure you do.
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
-
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Can you force Google to use meta description?
Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading (used for emphasis)?
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading? My clients are using heading tags for text they want to emphasize and make stand out. Does this affect search rankings for SEO?
Technical SEO | | jthompson05130 -
Google not using redirect
We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly? Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Which address do I use for citations
Hello, When I created my google places, I entered my address and when I got my google places activated I noticed that the address google places was displaying was a short abbreviation of my address. So my question is when it comes to creating citations for my listing do I grab the address google places generated for me in the listing or the long version of my address? I've just heard when it comes to creating citations, you need to make sure it is identical across the board. I hope this makes sense. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | fbbcseo0 -
Changing the anchor text of a big amount of links at once is bad for SEO?
Hi there, Our service at fotograf.de is a shopsystem for professional photographers. The customers can build their own website with our tool including an onlineshop to sell their pictures. We have a lot of links from our customers linking to our homepage. The links come from subdomains of our domain and from external domains. We are now thinking about changing the anchor text of half of the links (round about 300.000 links). Do we have to fear a penalization of Google for changing so many anchor texts at once? Do we get better rankings if we choose a more optimized anchor text or does this have no effect because most of the links are from subdomains (each customer has its own subdomain) of our domain? Thanks for answering! Sebastian
Technical SEO | | Sebastian230 -
.us domains vs .com - What does Google Think?
Suppose I had 2 domains, carloans.us & carloans.com with exactly the same links profiles, and content (not duplicate but you know what I mean). Would Google favour the .com domain? In my experience, yes. But I might be wrong?
Technical SEO | | Tom-R
Same with other not so standard domains like .biz etc. Am I right to believe that Google can prefer the more common domain extensions?0