Why Google scrambles/change our product page titles? And descriptions too?
-
Here is an interesting issue we are noticing lately: Google is always more scrambling and changing the title of our product pages in the SERPs results.
Here is an example:
Keyword: "bach arioso sheet music". We are down at the 6th spot, and the shown title is different from what's defined inside the TITLE tag of that page.
And that appears often for other keywords/product pages. Why's that? How can we control that? It is hard for us to optimize titles and test CTR and other metrics if Google is showing them differently to the users.
Similar issue with the description tag: sometimes Google instead of showing to the users the description tag contents, shows part of the text taken from the page even though the searched keywords are included both in the title and the description tag, and so I can't find justification to show text taken from the page instead... it is quite difficult to understand the motivation beyond all this!
Any thoughts are very welcome. Thanks!
Fab.
-
Yes, that makes sense... I will do that. Thanks!
-
You need to change it to something less keyword stuffed and less spammy looking that you are happy with and see how Google handles it. Experiment.
BTW, you and I may not think your title is keyword stuffed or spammy, but that does not matter - what matters is the algorithm is interpreting it as that, so you need to change it to get the title in the search results that is better than what Google is deciding for you.
-
Hmm... I guess I need to test a little bit more on this. That's good to know, thank you!
-
I think the way Google change them is often terrible, and I don't understand why it changes my titles and not my competitors' when they are pretty much all alike. I don't see much logic here... anyhow, if this is the way it works and there is nothing I can do about it, that's ok. I will make some more research on this topic. Thanks!
-
Yeah, I can understand that, but how can I test different titles, wording, etc if Google change them anyway? That becomes something hard to test... am I wrong?
-
Agreed, Google tend to change them when the algorithm perceives that the title of the page is not useful to the searcher. This usually happens when the title is spammy or keyword stuffed. Google is trying to better serve the searcher and not the webmaster by doing this. You need to experiment/split test the title.
-
Google tends to scramble the title tag and description tag up if they think that it will serve the user better based on the provided search query.
Sometimes Google changes title tags so they'll contain branding purposes.
Anyway nothing is wrong with Google changing your title and/or description tags. Google always serves what they think is best for the users. I've noticed that they were scrambling my things up too and they actually helped me improve my title tag.
-
Why not change it to the way Google is displaying it? Maybe they like that better
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
-
Author Byline in Page Title in SERP
I was exploring my company's visibility in Google News results, and I noticed the author byline in a recently published article was being pulled into the page title in the SERP. See the attached image for a screenshot. It makes it sound awkward: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You Patrick..." - as if we're explaining it to some guy named Patrick? We have the byline the same way in all other posts, but this is the first I've seen this happen. Has anyone seen/had this happen, and if so, have any ways to prevent it? Thanks in advance for any insights! Here's the post URL: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-find-best-cannabis-experience-high csvmF
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Outside Top 10 Even though - Higher Domain/Page Authority/Higher On Page Grade
Hi, Note: this is for Australian search results - for people in Perth.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HeadStud
The website is: http://thedj.com.au I am trying to optimise for the keyword 'perth wedding dj', but also 'wedding dj perth' and for some reason my website isn't even in the top 10 results. Here is what's weird though: My on-page grade with the On-Page Grader for the keyword 'wedding DJ perth' is an 'A' for http://thedj.com.au (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0135135hca) When checking the Keyword Difficulty in the Google Australia search enginge for 'wedding DJ perth' - there are 4 results which have a lower domain authority than 15 (in fact one result has a domain authority of 1) - http://awesomescreenshot.com/03f5134zd1 http://thedj.com.au has a Domain Authority of 23/100 and a Page Authority of 34/100. (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0bb5134tb8) So seeing as the page has gotten an A for on-page optimisation for the keyword 'wedding DJ Perth' and has a higher domain authority then many results in the top 10... why isn't it in the Top 10?! Bonus Question:
Why is DJ Avi showing up at the top of search results (Local listing) depsite the fact that:
a) He has no website to link to
b) No reviews for his listing
c) No keywords that I can see (other than the fact that he's a DJ)
Screenshot: http://awesomescreenshot.com/05151349cb Meanwhile our Local Places - Thanks,
Kosta
http://www.headstudios.com.au0 -
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 -
Magento Hidden Products & Google Not Found Errors
We recently moved our website over to the Magento eCommerce platform. Magento has functionality to make certain items not visible individually so you can, for example, take 6 products and turn it into 1 product where a customer can choose their options. You then hide all the individual products, leaving only that one product visible on the site and reducing duplicate content issues. We did this. It works great and the individual products don't show up in our site map, which is what we'd like. However, Google Webmaster Tools has all of these individual product URLs in its Not Found Crawl Errors. ! For example: White t-shirt URL: /white-t-shirt Red t-shirt URL: /red-t-shirt Blue t-shirt URL: /blue-t-shirt All of those are not visible on the site and the URLs do not appear in our site map. But they are all showing up in Google Webmaster Tools. Configurable t-shirt URL: /t-shirt This product is the only one visible on the site, does appear on the site map, and shows up in Google Webmaster Tools as a valid URL. ! Do you know how it found the individual products if it isn't in the site map and they aren't visible on the website? And how important do you think it is that we fix all of these hundreds of Not Found errors to point to the single visible product on the site? I would think it is fairly important, but don't want to spend a week of man power on it if the returns would be minimal. Thanks so much for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Is there a way to contact Google besides the google product forum?
Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall. We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help. We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened. We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously. We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties. Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit). We have made countless changes (please see below). Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered. Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed. At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year. Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords. Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did. We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes. We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming. For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point. The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working. We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business. Thank you! Changes Made: 1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly 2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file. 3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file. 4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content. This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar:
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes. Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products. We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less. 5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic. 6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow. We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual). 7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile. For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url. 8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did 9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects 10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1. Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords. We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse). I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself. Our website is trophycentral.com0 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0 -
Hosting / Redesign & Text Change
In the process of redesigning a clients site. The text and the design need to change to focus the site on conversions more than it is at present. The client is not happy with the current host, they want to change, my feeling is to either change a while before the site redesign is launched or a while after. Anyone got any opinions, experiences to share. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0